"Who the hell do you think you are?!?" "ME? Don't you KNOW who I am?"

“Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche~

Every once in a while, I'll have an attack of morality. I woke with a start this morning at 4 am with the thought "Who the HELL do you think YOU ARE?!?" My inner Sunday school teacher was standing with her hand on her hip and wagging a finger at me, frown lines pinched together tightly between her eyebrows and was reprimanding me vigorously.

Yes, I know...it sounds a little strange that the facets of my personality have their own identities and I can see them pretty clearly. But that's how it is with me.

I feel a bit cowed. I have never liked my internal Sunday school teacher. She's a mean, judgmental and elitist little bitch. For years, that part of was me was strong. Being a good little Catholic school-girl, that part of me was encouraged and cultivated to the point I felt guilty about just about everything. My choices. My desires. My impulses. Sex. Especially sex.

My inner Sunday school teacher is no fun. I'm not bad. I'm good. I've just been allowing myself a little more freedom lately. 

So, waking up with that part of me castigating me for my choices the past few months was not only unexpected, it was downright disturbing.

It has taken me YEARS to get to a place that I felt that I was finally comfortable with myself. My body. My looks (yes, believe it or not, I hated the way I looked). My thoughts. My sexuality. And when I finally got comfortable, I realized that for most of my life, I was in the wrong place, definitely with the wrong person and I had built this life around me that was making me unhappy and sick.

So, aside from some things about my life that I cannot change, being able to explore the side of me that I gagged, bound and suppressed for so long has been enormously gratifying and cathartic to me. My inner hedonist is reveling in my freedom. I'm not unhappy anymore. I am actually wanting to give myself permission to be happier.

I still find things that I didn't realize I had hang-ups about in myself. Things that when I discover them, rub me the wrong way because I know that they are just the last traces of that "other" life. 

I agree completely with what Nietzsche said EXCEPT living dangerously or being risky. I can't do that. I will push myself though. Much like anything else you think you can't do, it takes patience and practice and a whole lot of coaching the first few times. I know I won't kill my hang-ups overnight. It took a long time to develop them, and I've lived with them for the better part of 39 years.

My understanding about myself is growing. That brings me a measure of satisfaction. What is it that Percy Cerutty said about growth? "You only ever grow as a human being if you're outside your comfort zone". The funny thing is, is that the comfort zone I THOUGHT I lived in isn't right...

Have you ever been so wrong about what truly IS your comfort zone that when you find what you're comfortable with you're blown away by its intensity? I'm looking at my entire life now and wondering if I've been living as authentically as I should be...if I was wrong about what I really am comfortable with, then I could be wrong about a lot of other things...things I'm not just uncomfortable with, but REALLY fucked up over. THAT thought both exhilarates and scares me senseless.

Especially thinking that I may be wrong about relationships. Maybe I'm NOT so damaged that I could feasibly have what I thought I couldn't. Maybe it wasn't me, it was really him (GIGGLE that line is going to make me laugh all the time now)...maybe I don't need to be so driven by rules that I can allow myself something I thought I'd never have. A REAL-ationship. THAT right there is a scary thought!

My friend Tara and I were talking recently. I was telling her that I've been wondering if I'm doing the right thing in regards to allowing myself to date more than one person at a time, if she thought I was too fucked up to have a real relationship. I told her I was getting really sick of having men asking me out for the wrong reasons, that I get tired of them being fixated on what I look like because that's all they seem to talk to me about. I asked her to be blunt and tell me what she thought. She surprised me:

"You are a force of nature, no one is going to tame that, you would just shred them. But anyone accepting that, diving into the hurricane and not fighting it is in for a ride. Maybe you spit them out broken, or just move on. You leave them changed. You are beautiful, primal, fierce and even knowing that, people still come to you. The Goddess courses through you. I know that whoever tries to contain you wont manage, even if it is yourself. I know that these men have more than lust for you, there is plenty of that, but their feelings run calmer and deeper for you than that."  

What she said blew me away. It's not the first time that someone has said something similar TO me, ABOUT me. That's another "comfort zone" I'll have to address. Accepting that having more than a few people, who DON'T know each other, and saying the same thing about me MAYBE see something that I don't acknowledge about myself. I know I probably am very very wrong about men, I know that I've gotten very cynical as to why they want anything to do with me, and that those that are in my life right now want to do more than "building the fire"...but I think I'll save that box to open another time. Until then, I'll continue to be kind to myself and give myself solace with this thought about expanding my comfort zones:

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.” ~Charlotte Brontë~