Reticent No More

I've been participating in Landmark Education for a little over a year now and this endeavor has most definitively simplified my life. I've been freed up from years of "stuff" - physical and otherwise. This week I've had 2 major areas of life defined.

The first area has to do with how I've "failed" - namely how I've "failed" to sing on Broadway and how I've "failed" to publish a book. I haven't actually failed because I've never once auditioned to be on, or anywhere near, Broadway and I've never even completed writing any of my so called books so, naturally, they aren't published.

Bill and I had a brilliant conversation that unearthed where this fear of failure originated - and we discovered that it was at my birth. I was born early and had to stay in the hospital. My mother tells the story of how heartbroken she was to go home without her baby; of how she felt she had done something wrong. Something happened for her as a first time mother that also happened to me as a newborn and kept happening as we both grew older and further apart. From that moment onward, fear of failing, of being rejected, governed my choices. The pattern is crystal clear throughout my life - reticence reigned. Distinguishing this has opened up my whole friggin' world. The possibility to pursue what I want "out loud" and beyond is new and invigorating - I'm choosing to be whole and fearless and unstoppable.

The second area has to do with the way I've allowed my past to dictate my present and my future. I've struggled with how to describe what I do on a daily basis and with how it isn't what I used to do. I was an educator in a classroom. I've gotten present to how I'm *still* an educator but my classroom is bigger now. It includes the whole world and 2 students for life. I am choosing motherhood as an educational playing field and it's a grand one - perhaps the grandest I'll ever know.

Finding triumph in these 2 areas has inspired me to do things 1 week ago, I simply wouldn't...join a Moms group - which I swore I'd never do, write more openly and publicly - which I swore off doing, get serious about photography - which I've been swearing I would do. I also will learn to play the guitar so I can accompany myself at all the new gigs I'll be taking on. Watch out world, I'm on my way!