Exposure

Exposure, like everything, is good in moderation. A southern exposure gives your home good light in the winter, but maybe too much heat in the summer. Seedlings need fresh air and changing temperatures to germinate and grown strong, but they can freeze, dry out or rot. I need to build an online presence, let you meet me, learn how I think and what I think. If I resonate with you, we may both get something positive out of it. If you hear something dumb, or wrong, or difficult, I may have ruined that chance. The very exposure I try to create may destroy something. Where's the moderation?!

We don’t have to be perfect, we can’t be everything to everyone. But it’s scary, contemplating topics, ideas, opinions, and knowing that the way I present them can make or break me. I have ruthlessly culled blogs from my own Google feed when they just don’t mean that much to me. Did that hurt the owners of those blogs? Why can’t I be as coldly logical to myself? THIS is what I have to say, THAT is what I wrote, IF you don’t like it don’t read it.

Once it’s written, it is there forever, and that sort of permanence, that commitment is a big part of what holds me back and makes me reluctant. Yet I’m unwilling to hide behind a pseudonym or a company name. This IS

me, I might be able to offer you something! So I bounce around between outright confidence, desiring acceptance, and being annoyed at myself for caring.

That permanence also makes me very vulnerable, specifically the parts of me that are weakest and least sure of myself. I’m developing this voice as I go along, I’m trying out ideas and suggestions and procedures that may dramatically change in a month or in 5 years. But they have to be tested somehow, and this is the way that makes sense to me.

Last night I said to Man-In-My-Life that I am writing, I am posting, but I haven’t shared it with anyone yet because I’m embarrassed. Thankfully he didn’t press me then, maybe knowing that I will return again and again to that statement and wonder, Why? OK, that’s why, but So What?? Logic and emotion, they are at war and I must allow room for both, not support one over the other. So some days I will write and plan and think and do without a thought spared for responses or consequences, and some days it will be in spite of them.

Each of my teachers want to know my plans. My first mentor meeting is coming up and I have to discuss My Goals and Impediments to Reaching Them. This weekend is our next class, and I must email our main teacher an Intention On Where I Want To Go. Next month, when another teacher returns, she wants to know What Kind of Service Would I Like to Provide, How I Will Describe Myself, How I Want to Practice.

Making those choices and TELLING people who will remember and are there to HELP me is so very VERY permanent! And here I am all up in the air, flying by the seat of my pants. I don’t know what next month will bring, where I will live in 6 months, etc etc etc. I have very little faith in myself and very great fears of sleeping under a bridge. And telling anyone that, letting everyone know it, displays that vulnerability.

Yes, I KNOW I won’t end up under a bridge. I know I’ve always taken care of myself thus far and am strong enough to keep doing it. But the further along this path I travel, the louder the fear yells in my ear telling me I’m WRONG, I’m DOOMED. Knowing this, facing it, conquering it is the most important work I will do. Even if I NEVER help one single person with what I’m learning, I will have helped myself get over a fear I have had forever, that I CAN’T. But hoo boy the process of going through that fear threatens to destroy everything I have managed so far. M-I-M-L is just about sick of me, I can tell you!

Which is one final piece, resistance to change. I resist because if it’s all going to go away, if I need to create the ashes to rise again, I want to hang on to what’s here already just a little longer. Just 10 more minutes, I promise!

This post has no conclusion, no wrap up. I’m in the thick of it now, and am just hacking my way through. I’ll see you around the next bend.