[Isadora]

I am femme, flawed and fabulous. It has always been who I am from the inside out. It is a constant learning process to know who I am, I am never completely formed.

I am strong and independent. I am weak and inter-dependent. I am a very social being and everything seems to hurt deeply, especially as I age (we won't even start about being OLD and femme). When my self feels unsafe I am lucky to have people who will keep their promises and understand that being sensationally weak is not a bad thing. Asking for help from someone I respect, love and trust relieves me, it does not make me dependent.

I am loud and I am quiet. I have worked hard to know the difference between choosing to be silent and being silenced. It takes wisdom to do the first and alertness to recognize the second.

I am bossy, all the way to passive depending on the situation. Again knowing when to be which is always the hard part. I have learned a lot about myself and the choices I have made in my life. I like being in control until I don't like it. LOL

I am hurt and I am angry. I try to channel my own hurt and anger into positive action, but I am the first to admit, that it does not always work. We have been conditioned and socialized to be passive-aggressive as a way to handle our hurt and anger. (Great book on this called: Social Aggression among Girls by Marion K. Underwood, I read several years ago. She shares her extensive research that looks at how we are socialized to be socially aggressive and how suppressed anger/hurt effects our social interactions with other girls/women.) Sometimes my anger comes out as silence, a deep void of rage that swirls into a vortex of inner turmoil. Sometimes it is channeled into social action and sometimes I just scream.

I range from emotionally present to absent depending on my own feeling of safety. I find, again as I age, that my feelings are right on my skin and things that I would just let pass in the past, I won't. some things are not worth the effort and I let them go. Then there are some things I refuse to be silent about, I feel more deeply and sadness is released in tears and heart-ache. I am vulnerable now, only to the people I deeply trust, and those people get fewer and fewer.

I don't always need to be understood by anyone but me and I want to be accepted as who I am as a individual human being. I don't always want to be healed, I want to be heard. I don't always want to have to define myself, I just want to be seen. I don't always want to explain my choices, I just want them accepted as fully mine. I fight to keep my Shirley Valentine alive.

I am a a bell curve not a duality. My self is fluid. I hope it is always that way.