Even the mistakes and missteps.

The thing about sharing your life via a blog is that if you are terribly honest then you always end up being wrong, and there’s a record of it. It’s like humbling yourself in front of 200 or more people every day (and thank goodness you can’t see their faces or no one would ever do it!) – it’s like putting your life on a stage for inspection and amusement. Performance art – here is my life – the stranger it is, the better my blogging becomes (or at least, the more people want to read it).

I surprise myself with what I share here, and although I delineate between what belongs in my private paper journal and this public electronic one, they often merge in the intimacies I choose to reveal to strangers via red cedar. Yesterday’s post, for instance, is the type which makes me want to torch my blog entirely and take it down. Not because it is so revealing of anything in particular besides a proclivity towards cheap and easy encounters, but because I’m afraid that in two months time I will be posting here about how I am back at it or torn between one lover and another… And then I will be made a liar again. Or at least someone who appears to be hopelessly out of touch with herself.

I mean, just ten months ago I wrote:

“And what is it that I want? This is the part I have continually lied to myself about in the last few years – but now I can hear it so clearly that it can’t be denied. What I want more than anything else is to love and be loved in return – to be a part of a community of mutual aid and support.

….. I recognize too that my further self-isolation on the Sunshine Coast was rooted in similar, if not extended fears, the fear of continuing hurt. And now I am here, alone with myself and I am lonely for community and inter-connectedness. I am not sustained by only the trees and the ocean – I long for human love and interaction. I no longer value self-containment as the highest goal. I want to love and be loved and it’s just that simple.

And it’s the tremendous losses of the past several months that have made me realize this. I have been fighting the grief by building up my image of one woman alone – but it is a false picture – for this is not what I really want. It seems easier though to fake it than to admit that I am not really listening to what I have always wanted and never felt I had. The question then is, how do I go forward and make the changes in order to meet these long denied needs?”

Very clear. Very open. As true then as it is now. And yet as yesterday’s post attests I have been doing almost nothing to obtain that which I say is most valued. Yes, I moved back into my community, but rather than building the things I say I want, I have been pursuing a barren path as far as relationships are concerned. I am struggling even now to be authentic in this post. To not lapse off into self-indulgent analysis that makes me feel better about the whys of the whats that keep happening.

It’s not even that I’m angry with myself, because I am not. I feel quite good this morning. But still, I want what I write to be true and not just for the moment in which I write it but for me. For all of me. Otherwise I am inconsistent as a person, or at the very least denying myself of the life I am meant to live.

I have been seized lately by the need to right myself and clear the thorns from my path so that I might continue along it. It is not even as though I have been taking a side road all this time, but more like I have been standing still for eighteen months while the landscape moved by me. And now something has moved aside, and I can continue on in the way I so choose. I am tentative in my steps, I want each one to be true and consistent, the way I want my writing here to be. And yet, so much of this doesn’t feel like it’s about what I want, but what is, and what has to be. And that is where I am confused and afraid – that even the mistakes and missteps – are resonating through me now.

I don’t want to only get one more chance, but sometimes I am afraid that I have used up all my lives already. I have been too lucky. I have been too forgiven. If I step off in the wrong direction this time, will I ever get back on?