More thoughts from the discussion

I left the discussion yesterday feeling lonely. Perhaps I had hoped to find kindred souls, people who resonated deeply with my own experience, people whose experience I could deeply resonate with. Instead, the struggle of intellectual polemics still weighed on me, and I left, feeling unseen and unheard.

Yet a woman there had heard me - she even remarked outloud she was interested in my point of view, and wanted to talk more with me about it. No one else's remarks had gotten that particular honor.

I thought about it as I was walking away, thinking, I should go back and be open to the chance that this woman and I might have some common interest of the soul that would at least partially satisfy my hunger. But I did not turn around. The vision of being alone, unheard, not understood was so dramatic, poinent, even enrapturing, that I chose to continue in my drama than disturb it with the possibility of a different reality.

It is an old story, one I am increasingly becoming tired of. It is true that as a child, I found no connections, no one to relieve me from my self-alienation by telling me, "Here's who you are. Here's what I see when I look at you." I grew up in this strange confusing inner world of swirling thoughts and conflicting feelings, and found no one who could help me make any sense of it all, or give me a sense of who this person was who had the thoughts and feelings.

And when I go to an event like this, and I am not fully reassured that my thoughts are valuable, I fall back to the old story - still dramatic and full of pathos for me after all these years.

It is time to let the old story go, and step into my power.