Have you ever had the experience of realizing that you’ve been dealing with some traumatic experience in your past – perhaps your distant past – by shutting off some parts of your thinking or feeling? I guess we all do that – one of the ways we deal pain is by shutting down, staying in the safe places. Sometimes you don’t just refrain from touching the hot stove which once burned you. Instead you stay away from stoves in general.
Well, I started this blog in order to try to make sense of an unexpected emotional encounter which told me that I had been operating too much in this “safe” mode. I didn’t quite have a handle on it, but I knew, through what I now perceive as a lucky accident of fate, that there were some doors and windows in the old psyche that I had been keeping shut, that had grown maybe one or two coats of cobwebs too many, and which I had allowed to stay that way out of some sense that it might be dangerous to pry them open.
A blog is a good way to start taking those steps – to start to angle up sideways to asking some hard questions. People who know you and like you are around, and supportive, and you can take weeks or even months to gradually work a question around to where you are staring it square in the face. And by the time you do, maybe it’s not so scary or difficult anymore.
And along the way, the opportunities for creative expression are simply awesome. Stories, discussions, epic poetry, drawings and animations, maybe an opera or two – the things you can create are utterly limitless. Of course they are anyway, but we have so many ways of stopping ourselves from achieving those possibilities, that something to force us to open up those windows and fling open some doors is a good start.