I need to go back and get more familiar with “Sunday in the Park with George”. I think I may relate to it differently now. (Putting it Together” is a key moment in the show!)

This has been a week or more where pieces find each other and click together. You know maybe it's because of being bookended by great musical experiences! As Karl Paulnack tells us, the Greeks thought of music as “the study of the invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.”

Getting mad at the psychiatrist experience (which i will NOT be going back to) showed me what I did with that anger and fear before I let it out…I turned it inward which became anxiety and sadness. That made me realize that I've been doing that a lot lately and it's not healthy for me. I think in the first part of my marriage, I hadn't had many of those feelings. I was safe. Somebody loved me even when I thought that might never happen outside my family.

But before that, I took out those feelings another way. My anger and shame and fear had been well ensconced in my weight. I was able to feel like this comprehensively healthy person…except that I was 320 lbs. That's where all the negative emotions went and all the denial. I had no conscious clue that I was hiding anything.

A little history…when I was in 5th grade, my family lived in Vancouver, British Columbia for a year. It was fairly magical! I was cool and popular with the main crowd of adventurous, smart kids. I made a lot of friends and felt very accepted for all my strengths and regardless of my weight. Back home in America, I missed the year of jockeying for popularity in the top-dog-6th grade. My 6th grade year was pretty miserable – maybe as a result. I was teased and shunned by the popular crowd…which, unfortunately, was also well-blended with the smart crowd. I took refuge in an unlikely friendship with the most rough and tumble guy in the class…his name was actually Rocky! But Rocky's friends didn't like this much either…I was a white girl honing in on their small black crowd. The big science project for 6th grade was to build our own rockets and then we would get to take them to Robinson Field and launch them. I was proud of my rocket and excited for the whole day. When it came, not only did my rocket parachute land in a tree and I couldn't take it home, but it was that day when some of these tensions started showing their faces. One of Rocky's crowd took issue with the patch of lawn that I chose to sit on (by myself) and kicked me…repeatedly. I didn't want to get in a fight and I didn't want it to get worse, so I just took it. I hoped she'd get bored and I think that's what eventually happened. I don't remember moving. Kind of a silent protest, but one where I took the abuse.

I was already heavy for my age and it only got worse from there. I largely (no pun intended!) removed myself from anything related to attraction and attractiveness. I didn't realize (and wouldn't for another 30 years) that I was developing a whole stockpile of self-disgust. I shut myself away from most all exposure to the world of relationships. I had crushes…most notably on smart, geeky guys…but rarely put myself out there and was disappointed every time. All the way through college and grad school and for nearly 10 years beyond that. Forget thinking about who i was attracted to – men or women though I just assumed a heterosexual norm and it was entirely an intellectual exercise – I avoided the whole realm altogether!

Now, of course, many of these moments seem to come together. My defenses, my self-management, my sexuality…and, my reaction to feelings of anger and fear and such.

A friend posed a theory that first-born children may have different issues with love and trust than others. Not sure it's true, but the theory is that with the parents being new as well, it is hard to test the resilience of love. Both kids and parents are drawing and testing the boundaries at the same time and it would take way way more than anything i ever did to find and cross a line that would test that love. The worst offense I can remember in my WHOLE childhood is fighting with my Mom and getting grounded from going to my Sunday evening activities – which were my church choir, bell choir and youth group!! I “ran away” to our family friends down the street, lied amount getting a ride and defiantly (!!!) went to bell choir anyway. Rebel Girl!!!

So I learned a HUGE amount about love. About acceptance and pride and support. I didn't learn really much of anything about the resilience of love in moments of real anger and disgrace and disappointment. I never put myself anywhere that would test that theory. Not really. And now, at 41, I find that I am afraid to express anger or fear…especially to people I love. To trust that I/they can be angry or afraid and that love underneath is unshaken. I am the consummate diplomat and I try to be the keeper of peace and the protector of everyone else's feelings. Turns out that I both need to be the champion of my own feelings AND that my version of protecting others is sometimes closer to managing them than protecting them. I fact, it may be about protecting myself more than anything.

The bit with the psychiatrist is a foray into this discovery. I didn't know him and he was a potentially harmful person for me, but I was inclined to protect him anyway. It took time and lots of input from people who care about me to see it differently.

I'll say outright that I am afraid of where allowing doubt, fear and anger will take me. But I have to admit that I have seen where not expressing it has taken me in the past and regaining that weight would be something I would regret for the rest of my life. It's already starting to come back on…and I really believe that it's because I'm afraid to let go. That I am in danger of hiding again.

AND I also think that I have fundamentally changed. New levels of emotion and acceptance that have been opened up can't really go back and I actively don't want them to! I have powerful motivators of hindsight, accomplishment and a new reconstructed body. I have a commitment to being open to the world in much of this…thus, this blog.

It's about finding my roar and using it for myself…and soon. I'm afraid that I'll use it inappropriately…I'll roar up the wrong tree, so to speak. I'll break out and stake a claim that isn't the right long term choice. Of course, I'm also afraid of not roaring and not staking a claim for myself and using all my reason (and walls) to make that okay. Well, there's a bit of a rock and a hard place.

So…I come back to this middle place and letting the pieces keep finding each other. It's still a comfort to tell myself that I don't know what the future holds (and can't..so don't borrow trouble) and the new piece I'll add is that I could maybe trust that these fundamental changes and the heart-on-my-sleeve archaeological dig that I am on will mean I WILL know things when I need to know them.

And all of this in the middle of so many things. Nicole's first major surgery is less than a week away. I'll test for my yellow belt tonight if I'm not too sick. I expect to hear from the psychiatrist and my primary care today about last weeks developments. The weekend is full up and we've determined just this morning that some manner of creatures are living in our attic.

I may be blogging a lot. And if I'm not…you'll know why.

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