Protecting my Self from myself
Every rose. . .
Sketch by Megan J. Wheless
This month’s theme is “boundaries".
I am learning that I sometimes become frozen with fear when it comes to using my voice in any area of my life: personally, professionally, socially. That fear stems from a coping mechanism I developed a long time ago of keeping myself small so as to avoid criticism (see all of May’s posts on the theme “perfectionism”).
Yet, as a grown-ass woman, I have learned that keeping myself small as a way to protect myself from saying or doing the wrong thing and causing harm is not helpful to me or to anyone in my life. To NOT wade into the issues and struggles of being human is cowardly. It shows a lack of resiliency. I’ve come too far in my life’s journey to be so afraid now. I remind myself life is a “both/and” way of being: I can do both what is right collectively and what is right individually.
In the area of creativity (which is what I focus on in this blog), I have been afraid that the novel I just finished is too lighthearted and naive for what has unfolded in our society as of late. Is it the right time to begin letting people read a story that centers around a white adult woman who lost her family and receives the help of friends and acquaintances so as to learn more about her ancestry and her ability to be daring in a world of mystery and magic she has always avoided? In the writing of this novel, did my implicit biases get in the way and cause some (or all) of my characters to become stereotypes and literary tropes?
Honestly, I fret about these questions daily now that I have emailed the story to my beta readers. I printed up the novel so my husband could read it and I cringed when I read some of the passages. This morning, I truly considered trashing it, recalling it from my beta readers, or locking it away and starting something else that is more timely and more literary and less “beach read fun”.
If I did that, though, it would be a betrayal of who I am and who I am becoming.
To hide my novel away would be a betrayal to my creativity and all the time, effort, imagination, hard work, and heart I poured into the story over a course of two years. It would detract from the Truth that this sweet story saved me time and again from slipping into a deep depression when I lost my breast and went through two painful breast reconstruction surgeries. It would lessen the healing balm it provided me as I helped my husband navigate the choppy waters of continued abuse from his ex-wife. It would negate the journey I began four years ago when I ended my career, sold my house and many belongings, and headed to Asheville and the grandmother mountains that helped me recover my Soul. And the novel carried me through the disappointment of losing my ESL teaching job to the pandemic.
The boundary, then, is my limiting beliefs. My fear of being human in a time when we really need to stand up for humanity - ours and other people’s. This boundary is meant to be torn down. To leave me raw, vulnerable, and willing to be seen and to see others. To help me to continue to feel my own feelings and act from my intuition and authenticity. Trusting that even though I will stumble and fall and get it all wrong at times, I am resilient enough to at least get back up and keep going. My true Self is not fragile. Only my false self is and I am willing to let that shatter and break into tiny pieces.