I am grateful for freedom from fear.

 I often wonder how it all began. How did the feet of a girl who was once so determined and directed get set on the path of such mayhem? The answer to this question is not simple. I suppose the answers we need most rarely are. Nonetheless, it is a question that has carried a great deal of weight throughout my journey. In an effort to understand how it all transpired, I replayed the records of my life until the stylus jumped out of the groove. When my heart felt that snag, I stopped and I listened. What I heard was the voice of a young girl who was sent the message early on by her peers at school that she wasn't quite enough as she was. She learned that she had to show up with a little extra if she was going to get a seat at the table of acceptance. She had to work a little harder; do a little more; be a little...something else.  It was in this small space, the space between the easy rhythm of getting along with others and fitting in, that a seed was planted deep within my soul. Every time I experienced rejection or embarrassment that seed grew. In an effort to keep the seed hidden, I overcompensated by trying to earn the approval of others. I learned how to show others only what I thought they would be interested in seeing. I learned how to be whoever people wanted me to be and eventually I forgot who I was altogether. I was so disconnected from myself that I would have told you the seed was gone. I would have told you I learned how to keep it from growing. I would have told you I understood how to overcome that fear. In reality, I had only become a slave to it. I had painstakingly put up glass walls around my heart. Around my spirit. Around my soul. And I danced within those miserable walls completely unaware that I had built myself a prison. I would sometimes see the shadow of myself hovering in the corners of my cell but each time I saw her I would push her out. Gradually, she came to me less and less and my guilt at having treated her so poorly would haunt me. My solution was as it always was: ignore what I could and drown the rest. As the years went on, the walls of that cell steadily pushed in until I could not ignore the reflection that looked back at me. What I saw was horrifying. I would like to say that in that moment I smashed the glass walls of my cage in a victorious rage, but that was not how it went. Instead, I crawled on bloodied hands and knees out of that box and into my last treatment center. It was there, where the God-given gift of desperation became my saving grace and I was given the opportunity to reconnect with that long-lost girl for the first time in years. At first it was confusing. It was dramatic and exhausting as these two people converged and became reacquainted. But as the days and weeks went on, I felt that stylus fall back into the groove of the reliable, steady rhythm of my heart. I heard the sweet music of my soul once again and I knew I was free. 

I no longer live in fear over who will or will not accept me. I sometimes wonder but I know that how other people treat me has way more to do with how they feel about themselves than how they feel about me. Besides, as the saying goes, what other people think of me is none of my business. Some will be drawn to my music and some will not. Whatever the case, the important thing is that I dance to the rhythm I choose and THAT is freedom.