How to find the right words is the story of my life. I fill with impulses to write this or that, mixed in many confused layers, and it feels urgent to purge the mess, to create some sort of sense, to separate the tangled threads of meaning into something I can weave into a message that might matter or illuminate. It builds until I grip the bit in my teeth and spew forth something, anything to release the pressure.

Then when I read back, it sometimes happens that a light ignites and it feels so right, as if I knew what I was talking about. I impress myself with my own accidental brilliance, the way the words blend into a whole that actually says something real. I feel honoured to be me, in those moments.

“Yes, that’s what I meant to say—but I didn’t know I knew how to say it.” Or, even better, “Hey, I didn’t know I knew that… who said that? That is so true and beautiful!”

In those moments, I admire myself with a writhing kind of embarrassment, as if I might be caught noticing my own worth and be punished for it.

I had a recent close encounter with a woman who has the power of self-acceptance. She can say, “I am so honoured to have such wonderful gifts to offer,” and she means it. That blew my mind wide open. I judged her at first from my own grudging grip on so-called modesty, so trained to await praise from others that I didn’t allow myself to deserve. I was in a trap of need, psychically pulling on ‘them, whoever they are’ to give me what I could not allow myself to have, a feeling of worth.

The women I most love and admire stand up and rock in their own power, say Yes to themselves, are willing to be seen, heard and absurd. Yet those are the qualities that in me are seldom allowed the time of day except when they slip out sideways at those times my guard dog is seduced by substances into a sort of slumber. Afterward, I remember with shame the ways I praise my own self so slyly and shyly, say without admitting that I am saying it, “Hey, I’m pretty good, don’t you think?”

The ‘don’t you think?’ part feels to the other like being pulled on, sucked on, grabbed at, and who could enjoy that? Praise must come from inside, undemanded, commanded only by a natural upwelling of appreciative responsive life-energy that spontaneously speaks, “Hey, you rock, you’re amazing, I admire you.”

I must shamedly admit that I have been told such in the past by various beloveds and strangers and that I could not allow their praise to take root in the soil of my being or help me become more confident in the value of my own existence. I was trained young to doubt my right to be, and since then I’ve colluded with the forces of my own eradication, turning the oppressor inward and calling myself a victim. My internal bias is still skewed far from acting on the significance of the injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. To my mind, this can only mean that love of self is the place true love starts.

I’m not so hard to love, really. I’m sweet and chewy inside, with just the right blend of spice with nice. If I were outside of me, I’d like what I saw. I’d be my friend. So what’s the problem in here? Even now, somebody in my shadow is sneering at the self-obsessive slant of this posting, like don’t I have anything better than my own innards to focus on for heaven’s sake?

And I must say, give me a break, you critic voice within, it’s you I’m struggling to escape. I’ll self-obsess for as long as it takes, because you are the problem, not the solution. Once I get free of the sneering contempt aimed my way from within where it does not belong, I’ll free my song and spread my wings, finally getting to give to the world my gifts; and that will be because I do so love the world, not because I’m obsessed by how great my gifts are.

Somebody once told me that if I didn’t give my gifts to the world, it would be the same as taking them away. That’s a bit of a guilty twist, but the bottom line is, hey, perhaps the world needs my piece of the puzzle. Why shouldn’t it? What kind of a universe would it be if I somehow turned out to be the only puzzle piece that had no place in the solution? Now THAT’s self-aggrandisement, to suggest myself as some sort of unique exception to the law of the universe which states that everything has a part to play and a role to fill.

Everything belongs in its own right center, in its own world. I am the Queen of my Inniverse, and this is as it should be. I’ll leave the Universe alone except for what it is my right and true role to give to it from my heart and truth, and anybody in here who implies that I am not right to be beautiful and blessed in my own sight is going to have to go find some other self to shame.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under truth and strangeness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.