This Girl That Place

I firmly believe that I’m one of the most well rested, exhausted people on the planet. I have less personal responsibility than I’ve had in 24 years. I travel and I train for a position with a company that absolutely caters to me. I go to a center every day and learn as much or as little as I’m motivated to in order to meet my milestones and markers of the program, they pay for all my meals, a rental car, and they put me up in beautiful hotels. I don’t have to run errands during the week, grocery shop or even adult between the hours of 6pm and 6am. On the weekends I get to go where I deem home to be for that 36 hours of off time. After two months, the travel has become less annoying and more of a strange, new normal.
During the last two years I worked diligently to wrap my life, to wrap my heart, in a security blanket of predictability. There was only one way to drive to work, I knew who would say hi to me first every morning when I walked in the office, and the work I did there I’d been doing for over a decade. I grocery shopped on Sunday mornings and ate dinner at the same friends house every Sunday night. My house was always decorated like a Pinterest post, and I would go out of my way to do anything for anyone. I still sat on the the same cushion of the couch and slept on the same side of the bed that I did when Ken was alive even though he never sat or slept on either one I had. So with all that safe routine I knew a change, maybe a gentle tweak, of who I am was inevitable when I disassembled every part of my life and started reconstructing it one day at a time.

I get up these days feeling like this bad ass bitch ready to take on any and everything-and believe me, I show up ready to go. But, if people could crawl inside my body, they would see the ruins-they would see that sometimes the past isn’t where you thought you left it. It’s taken these last few months of watching the human experience ebb and flow while I travel, and being in new places where the only familiar thing is the sound of my own breathing at night to make me realize a security blanket was never what I really needed; not ever.

I don’t think I’ve met one person that didn’t have some type of insecurity- I know some people that wear theirs like the fur coat in a Mackelmore video and are absolutely smothered by it. Then, there are others, that present themselves in such a way, that I’m shocked at the reality of what weighs them down behind it all. For me, I’m confident as hell in my work life and the ability to make it from one day to the next adding value along the way. I use to define my insecurities by how differently I think than other people do, but really, that’s what makes us individuals, right? My insecurities are about depth; about the ease in which I wear my soul on the outside and the fear it won’t be understood or cared for.  Maybe, just maybe, it’s in those moments where you feel like your exposing too much of your heart and mind that you’re actually getting it right; that your need for a security blanket is gone because nothing is protected by acting like you don’t have it.

I share a lot of myself in the pages of this blog and to a select few outside of this realm. I often ask myself why it’s so easy to purge my mind here and not in a personal message of some kind.  The answer is quite simple- Vulnerability. When people read these words they can stop or start anytime they want to and I don’t know which one they are doing-ignorant bliss if you will. But, when I take it down to an exchange between one other person the rules change-I no longer have control over the outcome. Control…safety….it’s the absence of those things where the beauty of change has happened in my life.

“Catch flights not feels” I get it….I’ve proclaimed to the world over and over that I have my foot in the shallow end of the pool and I don’t have the capacity for anything deep or meaningful. All truth exposed-I’ve been treading water in the deep end for so long I’ve forgotten how much I love to swim-how much I adore being present in other peoples lives.  I finally had this realization that you can care for someone and simply enjoy their company without it being anything more or anything less than exactly what it is. The last I checked caring wasn’t a synonym for romantic love or fucking.  The risk in being authentic with another human being is rejection but, what if you attract the right person like a friend that feels like a soulmate or a connection you can’t explain? The conquering of any insecurity is the understanding that those who choose to look no further than the surface don’t deserve your depth…..ever.

Even tonight, as I sit in my hotel room typing my cares away, I’m acutely aware that I will always be too much of something for some people and I won’t be enough for others. My intentions will be misjudged some days and only those who have allowed for me to be vulnerable will guard the soul I wrap myself in now. And as for my heart that I give so freely I hope it stays that way, wild and free, because I know it can handle another scar if it means remembering how much I love to swim……