Let Her Out (no.1)
Post #1: Start Here.
I want to speak and I'm afraid to speak.
I dying to write and I'm terrified to write.
There is so much bottled up, numbing, scrolling, watching--anything but feel, seems far more manageable than unleashing the volcano of emotions waiting to erupt.
Reading was my escape for a very long time.
Which new book can I bury myself in?
Or perhaps I’d take a new class, learn a new skill.
Oh, and there’s that fabulous new podcast I’ve been hearing about.
Walking, driving, cooking, cleaning-all opportunities to have someone else’s voice, other than my own, rolling around in my head.
Another new distraction, telling me what to do, believe, think, be.
Shhhhhh. Enough!
I don't want to read right now, that podcast will be there later, I need to be alone with my own voice, I need to be alone with “her”.
She seems like a distant memory or long forgotten friend.
Like a half developed polaroid, I have these foggy scattered pieces of her, what she sounds like, how she feels, what she thinks about the world.
I know she was fierce, brave and bold. Fearless.
She’s me but so very distant, she feels more like I’m describing someone else.
I think she might’ve been cool, not hip, cool, “beat to her own drum” cool.
I think, I’d like to know her again.
I don’t need to lean on the voices of others for inspiration. She’s there, somewhere.
Why is it so easy to forget, I have everything I need; decades of data, decades of living, being, swirling around inside of me.
No need to offer up any more real estate, to the voices of others.
For too long, I’m not even sure where I end and the world begins, we are all so emmeshed.
2021 was a long process of quieting all those voices, telling them to shut the f*** up, becoming quiet and listening to her.
Listening to that little girl whose voice was muffled long along in place of this voice or that voice.
Mormonism, diet culture, the film industry, Los Angeles, the wellness mega complex, Mario, motherhood, private progressive school, what it means to be “woke”.
I listened. To anyone and everyone but her.
Right now, the only thing I'm interested in giving space to is what she has to say.
And I'm listening because she's been silenced for far too long and someone needs to give her a god damn megaphone.
And that someone needs to be me.
Let’s do this already.
January 2022
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