There’s something — a mystery, a force —that is you.
Only you.
Fully human, and yet
not like anyone else.
She is good.
She is powerful.
But, you’ve been taught to be
afraid of her.
You’ve been taught to
make nice, be quiet, take up less space, and
become smaller.
Take care of everyone around you,
even the imagined demands.
Put yourself last on the list.
Actually, you
don’t belong on the list.
You can barely hear her now —
the joyful, the silly, the wildly powerful you —
her voice is so faint.
The shrieking, strident crying voice of
you’re not good enough
has been so loud in your life that
you believe that if you rejected every weird
part of you and perfected all the parts of you
that don’t fall into line with what society requires,
you will eventually be rewarded with
love and peace of mind.
It hasn’t worked yet, has it?
Until you hit your 40s or 50s, though, it
seemed to work. From the outside,
you’ve figured it all out.
You’re smart. You’re successful.
People admire you.
But you know that you’re pretending.
How hard you have to work to stay focused or
play by the rules of society that require you to
ignore the way your mind works, naturally.
You don’t allow yourself to pee, even though
you really have to go, because
that work must be finished first.
You’ve spent so much of your life spinning,
ignoring the signs from your body that
you must change your life.
This familiar world,
no matter how hard,
is safe.
Uncertainty makes your body hurt.
Your skin hurts.
You’re scared of the dancing because
it might be on the brink of a cliff.
Better to be passive and complain
than lean into the places that scare you.
But at some point in your life —
a terrible illness, a loss, a shift in your life
that hurts — you realize that
you need to let go of your fears and
dance, freely, fully aware of that cliff
and still dancing, anyway.
You need to be you.
Does this resonate with you?
Here are some practical tips for how to start dancing and stop being so afraid.
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