It's the thirty first of December and I just deleted all but one of my past blog posts. I reread them before I deleted them, of course, and so I now fully realize exactly why I haven't written anything here since the end of July. I had pigeonholed myself and didn't want to return to the scene of the crime.
It is all too easy for me to tell you all about myself when I am writing. I will tell you things that I might never tell you in person. That's what I love so much about writing and yet that's exactly what I detest about it at the same time. Such writing can draw you in and repel you in only a few seconds and then I am left naked and trembling and wondering what the hell happened. Am I responsible for all conclusions that may be drawn from my confessions? What is my intention in revealing myself to you, the reader, who may know nothing at all about me until I so freely share my deepest and most hidden feelings? I want to show you an alternative way of reading, of contemplation, of intrigue and fascination. And even then, all you will ever really know about me at those moments in my words are these little pieces of a speck in time that may never reveal themselves again...it is very tender business, this arrangement of the letters mixed with secrets and dreams.
I often write about my sexuality because it can be so confounding, misleading and seemingly limiting. Writing is not about limitation and yet by July I began to feel limited by my own writing. I had been writing about what it is like for some women to love other women and what it had meant to me when I had loved another woman. No sooner had I done that did I also feel an alienation, that I was divorcing myself from another reality that is also a big part of me as a woman, that of my love for men.
I have only been fully in love several times in my life, twice with men I was married to and once with a woman who did not love me in return. Most of my liaisons have been with men. I have never been in a committed relationship with another woman though I have been attracted to some. There have been many times in my life when I tried to define my sexuality and label myself as either heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian but I have come to resist this tendency of labeling because it pigeonholes me and can cause alienation, and not just in myself. The labels of sexuality do not define my heart in any way, or my capacity for loving, because those rare times I fall in love it's with the heart and spirit and soul of a person, the person who embraces mine, my heart and spirit and soul, at the same time. It can be in near vicinity or all the way across the world. It is not limited by distance or earthly time zones.
I know this isn't comfortable for some, shedding the armor. For me it's just part of my healing from abuse and violence. I've had to learn how to walk around and be with people without the shield up all the time, so I can actually see that they all aren't out to hurt me. As a result I have come to see how it's become all too easy in this world for some to dismiss people based only on their differences. I seek to find the similarities in our hearts, in our souls and in our spirits so I resist the pigeonholing,
especially my own by my own hand. Here's to freedom in 2013.
