“Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” -A question I dread above almost all others.
How do you describe yourself accurately, succinctly, honestly, modestly, fairly, interestingly, especially when you are pretty sure you don’t actually know yourself? You don’t. You list the things that are important to you and hope that it helps other people understand you a little better, I guess. So here goes…
I’m a 40-something mother of a toddler, stepmother of a teenager and an almost-teenager, wife, teacher, mental health counsellor, writer, reader, lover-of-cooking-and-baking (though hater of the nightly chore of “What’s for supper?”), living in the perpetual winter of mountainous Canada. I love the mountains and the ocean and animals and sleep and peace and beauty and stillness. And I don’t get enough of any of those.
I’m also a person so tied up in her own head that I don’t know which way I’m going most of the time, and I have decided that has to stop. So really, for the purposes of this blog, the previous paragraph doesn’t matter. I am a person on a quest to untangle the Gordian Knot that is my past and present, my psyche, my personality, me. I wrote recently about wanting to be different, but a friend kindly pointed out that I don’t need to be different, I don’t have to change myself into someone else, but instead, I’m evolving. That’s a much nicer way to think of it, that I’m not broken, I’m evolving into being more myself.
Of course, I’ve spent far too much time around pre-adolescent boys and all I can think about when I hear the word evolution is Pokémon, and then I have to wonder what new powers or abilities I will have once I’ve “evoluted” (I don’t know if that’s the actual word they use in Pokémon, but that’s what my stepson has always called it. Of course, he’s also the boy who said “kasploded” instead of “exploded” until he hit age thirteen, so who knows).
So About Me: I am a human being trying to reconcile all the disconnected bits of myself, to understand why I do the things I do so that I can change the unhealthy things and be even better at the healthy ones, so I can be happy (at least some of the time) and experience life as it is meant to be, for the first time in a very long time. I write this blog as part of this quest, to make real the mess in my head, and because I have loved words and their power since I was a small child. I have held back my words for too many years. No longer. Here am I. And here they are. Hear them. Hear me.