.pathologically verbose.

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, I had a purple diary -did it have a unicorn on it?- complete with a little brass lock.  I lost the key early on in my journaling career and so I would have to pick the lock every time I wanted to write some piece of information which seemed terribly important to my near-adolescent self.  The added "security" didn't really matter for long though because I lost interest in the thing after perhaps half a dozen half-hearted entries.  Even then I knew that there was more to making something interesting to read, even if just for myself, than chronicling the events of daily living.  Or rather, of my daily living, anyway. 

Fast-forward twenty years and you would find me staring at a white box on a computer screen and a flashing cursor that is patiently awaiting some direction from the keyboard and me, not-so patiently awaiting some inspiration from the world.   Eventually the inspiration came, like it does for many people throughout history, in the form of an impending life-changing event.  That event did come, of course. However it was not the one I had imagined and suddenly inspiration flowed from a place I was unaware existed.  

Just like that I had another diary.  This time with stormy seas on the cover; if ever there was a unicorn on this one it has since been lost to the churning waves.  This time with no brass lock.  This time with the pages laid open on a crowded bus stop for people to flip through as they passed the time.  These last five months I've wrestled with the idea of slapping a brass lock on this diary and squirreling it away.  

I am, in my three-dimensional life, not prone to speaking about things as personal to me as the things that somehow make it from my thoughts to this white box on the computer screen.  There are four, maybe five people with whom I feel completely comfortable speaking about some of the more sensitive subject matter that I write about here.  One of those people being Leif and another, my therapist. I am not even really convinced that they count in the tally seeing as I think of one of them as half of my whole and the other I write out checks to.  

Being aware of the fact that people who know me outside of this place read what I write makes me feel extremely vulnerable.  Not only is my diary laid out on the bus stop but I am doing readings from it while standing there naked, catching occasional glimpses of familiar faces peering out from all the passing buses.  I don't know which is worse, having those people acknowledge what I've written in some way -so that is what she looks like under her clothes?- and thus forcing me to speak more freely about what I feel or having those people never acknowledge what I've written, never acknowledging the elephant in the room, and thus forcing me to address my vulnerability.  Neither situation is comfortable for me.  But my therapist would, and has, told me that being uncomfortable isn't always a bad thing.  Being exposed doesn't always mean dying from hypothermia.

And I am finding that she is right.  

In five months I have felt extremely exposed and on display.  But I haven't yet slammed the book shut, sealed it with a little brass lock and found the nearest leaves with which to cover my nakedness.

By leaving this diary at the bus stop I have met many other people there who are, along with their own diaries, waiting for the same bus as I am.  If we have to be waiting for the bus to come, I am glad that we are not waiting for it alone.

So I will keep writing and hoping that in my nakedness I am not too harshly judged and that I will learn not to care if I am.