In Old Friend From Far Away, Natalie Goldberg writes:
Let's look another time at this worry about what people close to you - or people not close to you - will criticize you for. What are you going to do? Walk around with masking tape glued over your mouth? You have to speak. That's why you put the pen in your hand to begin with: in order not to blank out or turn your back. You have to be willing to go into the hot, steamy center, to go to the mat for sorrow, grief, concern, in order to shed light on what has been in shadow ... (Page 33)
In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott writes:
We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must ... You can't do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can't find your own true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place. You can tell if they're there because a small voice will say, "Oh, whoops, don't say that, that's a secret" ... So you have to breathe or pray or do therapy to send them away ... (Page 198 & 199)
Yes, I respond.
I have put the pen in my hand to begin with (since age sixteen, actually) in order not to blank out or turn my back.
And, yes.
I must go through the door in the castle even when I was told not to. For, I must discover my own true voice.
This is something that has been driving me for a very long time. Searching for my voice about my experience growing up; my voice about quality relationships for children's emotional health and well-being as a priority - even more important than reading and writing; and most importantly, my voice about teachers and parents reflecting on their own childhood, and making connections between that and how they understand, and thus, interact with young children and others.
And yet ...
It is the very fear of what others think of me, or how they are metaphorically reading over my shoulder, that stops me in my tracks each time just as I am about to put pen in hand, or peer around the forbidden door. Some might call it writer's block. I call it my dilemma about loyalty. For, my loyalty has too often been called into question - sometimes just through silence or shunning of me by others, and at other times through their harsh, shaming, painful words to me. The very fact of my questioning, or trying to understand the dynamics of relationships that affected my emotional development has been termed disloyal. My own experience of my life has been called a lie. So much so that I have learned not to trust my own emotions.
And so ...
Recently, I discover in therapy that I am standing at a cross roads. Just as I am now at a stage in my life of confidence and freedom to be myself, at the same time the past questioning about my validity and loyalty rises up to block me from writing down what I know to be my truth - about my Self, and especially as it pertains to the subject of children needing attention - relationship - from those significant adults in their lives. It seems that I cannot shrug off, let go, or rid myself of the role I was taught way back as a young child - to be good, quiet and unquestioning so as to receive any love or acceptance at all. And if I did question or speak out - rejection and shaming was inevitable.
At my last therapy session I was given a choice - a challenge: Slip back and paralyze myself remaining stuck within my old childhood mythology, or flourish as an older woman, who knows both from experience and knowledge what is best emotionally for me and young children, and who feels free to share her own powerful story to benefit others.
A year ago at Mining Nuggets: In honor of ...
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