This one thing... Telling the truth.

This is Erika, quoting Hemingway in my head and it's what happens to me any time I sit down and start to write and cant get started. Tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth. Usually it's followed by me asking myself Kelly what are you trying to say?

There is a song it just came on as I finished that last paragraph and it made me smile and pull the comfort sheets of my self up tight around my heart because of the tweak it put in my chest the second I heard it start and the immediate smile and hush of breath it drew. It is one of those serendipity songs and one that always no matter what makes my spirit emerge from whatever tight little haunt of me in which it's hiding. It's one of my fighting songs, and it is the song of songs that would of course in this instance speak to me.

I thought that pain and truth were all that really mattered but you cant stay here with every single hope that shattered. Big Country. Oh this song. The one that Kelly J put on the CD when I sold my shit and went travelling in 2004--it played as I pulled out of Chestertown and left my disillusioned past behind. The past. The past? Let me say this to the past. It becomes you, shapes the you you become. For many months I have worked to heal my associations of me, and my patterns of my past that became patterns long before I had the mind awareness to know any better. I have begun to live motivated by one idea: we regret not what we've done, but what we have not. I have had to ask myself again and again, and sit quiet surrendering to me, to the long inner road towards peace and silence within to hear the answer: years from now what will I look back on and say because I did not do this one or two or three things, I regret? It is in this way I've submitted to me, to following my truth and being brave and strong enough to stand in and go towards who I really am.

There is one area--love, men--where I have a backlog of mess. I am in the context, here, now, ongoing, of forgiveness and peace in that area, it's a constant motion thing for me. And as to this, as to regret, and to telling the truth. There was one, a single real regret that clung to me and went something like this:

I should've been true to myself. The moment, the second I knew I was in love with him--and no longer in love with the one I was with--I should've been honest with myself and with everyone involved. I was so in love with him. I should've gone forward and to him, and not looked back.

I should've. But that's not what happened. And so how does life unfold--how does it mark you, and push you along when there is indeed this one thing that you look back on and did not do?
What happens is you quantitate, you consider. You loop over and over again in yourself and become lost in your self and hate and even further have more and awful disbelief in yourself. You become deeply deflated, hopeless even and don't know why, because often times regret hides itself if you are lacking in a certain capacity for self-honesty in some areas in your life, so that's what happens: if you are like me and you have hurt in a certain area of your life, old hurt, old covered-over pain from long long ago before you even really were you yet, than being true to yourself in that area comes out all slanted and sideways because to really be true means first to have to re-live through the old pain that's still there. And that's fucking hard. Especially when that part of you's always been broke.

Then, one day you wake up. It's a half-waking, but I'm a fighter, so you grab for it. And you realize god damn it, this is my life. This is my life. And perhaps this regret was the one, the one key to the door that is finally, for real and completely, going to make me own me in my entirety. That is going to make me stand up, and be true as I can to myself.

You start to get honest then, about your wants, your needs, about your past. About who you are.

I've identified the things, the couple of them. And I'm going whole-hearted after them. BUT MORE IMPORTANT. I get it, I get me now. I know me, and love me, all of me. I know how to be true to my self. Get it? I know now how to be honest to me. And to tell the truth, and not miss opportunity. I have healed from the early fucked up shit and abuse, or at least have self-awareness that is full and complete, and real. Not sideways and slanted and blind or numb in some parts. I have broke parts you know, who doesn't? But those are now the places I learned to nurture and be gentle with myself instead of denying and hating and refusing, because of denial and numbness and self-hate. Those are the places I have medicine, real virtue now. Where I can be even more gentle and loving towards me, and others, as result.

I am real now. I am whole.

This is my life. And I guess that one regret is no longer on my list because the gift that came from it is absolutely nonexchangeable. I hope that he--the lighthouse guy, the one who led me here to this deep and dark well of my self, the one who suffered at my hands and who I ultimately pushed away and forced to walk away without his own looking back--I hope he is well. I hope he is well: is full, is whole.

I am being true to my self, to my heart. It's all I ever really wanted to learn how to do. That part I don't regret, not at all.