Hello again, dear friend

I just updated my other blog "Shedding the Shell" and this is what I wrote. I believe that it should be joined in to this one. That the posts I put on here or there will be shared, because when I created two different blogs I had wanted one to be separate, to keep my secrets. Now, I want to be me. Just me, in all the glory and messiness of it all. So enjoy.

Let's be real.

I like to journal by writing in my book, a collection of pages bound together, where I can see the tear stains, the coffee spills, and the emotional outpour that went into that days events. I will treasure those words, my most sacred words, for a very long time. It could be that I'm a pack-rat, it could be the need to keep my thoughts, but regardless it is something that I will keep in a box hidden somewhere until I stumble upon it accidentally. I will sit on my bedroom floor and relive these harsh chapters of my life with either a shake of the head, some tears or regrets, or a smile for seeing how naive I was. I like to feel the pages, to change up my writing style, and just let it all out because I can...without retribution for feeling a certain way. It's glorious really.

But......................there is this massive part of me that likes to share and write about my experiences because someone somewhere might benefit from it. So I'm going to try again. To put some of what I go through on a blog, an online journal, a place where I'm 'anonymous' but not at all really. Someplace unlike facebook, where if I say something and people want to hide behind a screen and judge me they can and then smile to my face. I don't know if you 'like' this, I don't know if you've even read it, but at least I know it's for me and not to prove something to my friends or to be retweeted.

So what's new with my transformation? Shedding the shell started out as a weight loss journey and expressing my vegan experiences, but what I never expected in the past three years was to literally shed my life skin. I've changed in major ways and experienced things that I never even considered an option. In my youth I learned quickly that people can be messed up, that life is unfair, and that trusting someone, even yourself, can be a mistake. I used blogging as the beginning steps of letting go of shame. I tried to give only snippets of what I was going through because admitting some of the truth was less painful than realizing all the truths at once. I didn't want to say what I really needed to say. I didn't want to share all of the horrors, but only some of the frights. I let others tell me that I couldn't say anything about what was happening because it affects more than just me, but in the journey to healing there needs to be a moment when you're free to talk about what has happened. There needs to be consideration for the parties that were involved, the ones that need to be heard, so that others might find comfort in something other than isolation. I turned into a compartmentalizing, hollow shell of the person I always was. In the past three years I've come to shed that shell and experience who I am under all the junk that just that piled up. I didn't choose that moment to break the chrysalis, but rather had it shattered for me. I needed to, at my own pace, pull those pieces away and climb out.

It's really bright out here...in this new life.

It's different and the same. It's a life I built and love, and a life I was tricked into and try not to regret. I wasn't ready to completely let go, but knew that the safe cocoon I was living in was no longer there. 

Where do you go when there is no place to go? The life I had built wasn't as real as I thought, and the future was unclear. There wasn't a going back or forward until I had shed the shell, slowly becoming the person I am. 

A person. A human at the basic level. Vulnerable, in all my strengths.