Promises from a surfacing person.

Nowadays I will ramble on to any acquaintance or quiet night I find. I tell them exactly what I feel when I feel it. I often find myself apologizing a lot too--even to those who have known my ways for years. I apologize for my lack of filter, for my external monologues, and my short-lived bouts of mania followed by an urgent need for sleep. I leave a lot of parties early. I slip out without saying goodbyes. I skip with joy to the parking ramp and relax in the solitude of the night. My dear friend tells me, "Now, don't keep yourself in a container." I'm not. I'm trying not to. And I think I am doing a pretty swell job at it considering. But I cannot hide it when my heart beams back, "I love the time spent in my head."

It startles me how little I hold myself closed. I am an open door to any initial conversation about the meandering of religion, the lack of direction, and the pain of growing up. I am startled by how quickly I can snap off, like an unfamiliar room going pitch night when you are standing right in the middle of it. Bring up an unfavorable topic, like Thoreau's body of literature or the pleasure of keeping time, and I will send you bumping into all of my clumsy, made-from-wood-that-feels-like-steel furniture without a hope for you to find EXIT.

It reassures me how patient family, most friends, and even more near strangers are with me. It is like the universe sent out an open-letter memo with instructions on the right things to say at the right time. I give heartfelt thanks to the universe and those who check their e-mails every day. And in return I am trying to give them all the best and worst parts of me in honesty. I am picking up where I remember myself to have been three years ago. A work in brutal truthfulness. A work in authenticity. I do not support shameless pride. I will not discredit the experience of a despairing teenager--telling them that they do not know what love is. I do not indulge in giving leave of conduct to friends who bat eyelashes at their other friend's interests (When I was nineteen I would have gladly patted them on the back in their conquests). Now I do my best to slip on the heartache of other people, try it on, and wear it for a while. No one deserves neglectful heartache, no matter how much it strengthens. We are all struggling; we are all trying to heal. No one needs the extra burden of other people's carelessness on top of all of that. I can barely babysit myself at the best of times; I have no energy to coddle those who are not wide-eyed breathers themselves.

It all moves in twelve hour shifts. Hope fills me for the morning and Sadness takes over when Hope goes home to sleep. Sometimes they trade because Sadness has too anxious a mind and needs to air it out into productive work. But often the two do this without informing me, and to punish their short, or no, notice switch, I make Sadness stay a few extra hours past Her stint.

But I am trying to love myself as others love me. I am trying to see myself as others see me. I make no excuses for my faulty actions--I make apologies. I eat less, but instead I eat my favorite foods when I want to eat them (Cheese and chocolate are always on the menu). I read a lot of women writers. I lie in bed with a sometimes busy mind, and keep telling it something I heard that has helped me, "Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it." And to my surprise my cycling thoughts shut off, and I am left with a lightness and a love that I have not felt in months. Funny how the smallest of things help a seemingly code-red mental emergency.

I want you to know that I will be alright. I have a whole person inside of me, it is just floating--bit by bit--up to the surface. What a shaky, unsteady creation it is in the making. But every day another part of it comes together, and I welcome each part. I want you know that I am going to be bigger and brighter than I have ever been before.

I've had to rid myself of other pieces of myself and will probably continue to over the course of this year, but they will be toxic pieces. Pieces you will not miss in me. I am reminding myself that I deserve to be loved. And those who love me are doing an incredible job of showing me this. I promise that I love you back, but I will show it better in the coming months.

They say that tragedy hits in threes. I believe this. Three is the divine number. I have never trusted evens. Three friends gone last year, and this year set me up for the triple tragedy of my own sort of passing--the professional, the family, and the personal. But I believe this is only a passing of a former self, and this strange transition of a year will pull me into everything I was meant to be.