Dilemma of a title
I agonized about what to title this blog.
Early on, I decided to call it, TRUTH SPEAK, but every time I sat down to type I was so stifled by my masculine energy I could.not.start. I arranged and rearranged sentences like doll house furniture, wondering if they were actually saying anything. If they were anything.
When I get overwhelmed, I focus on minutia. I become consumed with with figuring things out. I am convinced there is a right answer that will cause the least pain. My mind spins and spins and spins outcomes like cards of wool.
Meanwhile, my body lives the expression, “the devil is in the details”—my stance straightens, chest tightens, breath shallows, jaw clenches, mind races. I am not present. I am not grounded. I am somewhere else. I have always called this anxiety but now I am seeing that it is also a reversion into masculine energy. I sweat perfectionism. I see algorithms. I bathe in options while my body, my inner woman, drown in mind chatter and noise and distractions below the iceberg of truth: I am scared.
The truth is that writing this blog is as terrifying as it is liberating for me. My story, which will come out in tides, is one of staying hidden, playing chameleon inside the boundaries of social etiquette, of not telling. My story is very much one of not telling.
But my secret keeping asphyxiates my inner woman—the very thing I promised not to do. I needed a way to access her, to still the man.
“I can’t start,” I told my sexuality coach. “I don’t know what to call this blog and every time I start, I obsess the whole time.”
I expected her to say, that’s normal.
“Then break up with your degrees,” she told me, instead. “They are blocking your feminine expressive flow.”
At first I didn’t understand the link between my masculine and my fear. I was proud of my training, and yet…and yet, I could not start a simple blog post without days of angst.
So I worried about her advice for a week, until I was ready to honor the very intention of this blog.
Early one Wednesday morning I “broke up with my degrees.” I took the diplomas off my wall. In their place, I put two paintings—one landscape collage and one gold-toned abstract that I liked for no reason other than its glint and allure.
My entire body sighed. Like a warm current of air, I felt the collective wisdom of contemporary and ancient women—of the bone collectors, the midwives, the dancers. I felt like a woman who glowed. A woman who had something to say. A woman who experienced meaning by making art. A woman who saw the way light caught the corner window pane at dusk and captured it in haiku.
Images and words started flowing out of me like a river.
I told my sexuality coach about the shift.
“Create an alter,” she said. “To honor your feminine.”
Dutifully, I did. I created an alter to my inner woman. On a purple shall, I placed white feathers and rose quartz yoni eggs and wheat stalks and a candle and a tiny, live garden. I carved my inner woman the physical space she needed. “A room of her own,” as Virginia Wolf called it, or in this case, a corner of her own. A corner to drop into the energy that resists the urge to copy edit the life out of sentences because that—that—critical, judging, omnipresent editor is brother to the perfectionism that keeps me in vigilance and fear.
It is EGO.
It is cunning and insidious and blocking. It sabotages ideas and intuition and association and poetry. It is my graduate degree mentor. It is my college professor. It is my magazine editor. It is my father. It is my husband. It the tenor that tells me there is a right way that leads to the to the capital-T TRUTH. It is sabotaging, rule-following, and stifling.
It stifles.
The very name I had chosen, TRUTH SPEAK, I realized, was a manifestation of my masculine. It evoked an unconscious image of a judge pointing a finger, holding a gavel, weighing and discerning. I felt pressure to perform under the charge to SPEAK ONLY THE TRUTH, whereas the intention of this blog was simply to speak my truth. A truth in a sea of truths. To let such truth rise from experience instead of be curated by ego.
A very real truth is this: every cell in my body wants this blog, and life, and my sexual awakening, to be neat and orderly and contained. I want the name, the logo—dear GOD, the dilemma of the logo!—the aesthetic to be perfect because, when I am in masculine energy, I conflate perfect with happy.
I conflate perfect with safe.
So while I don’t like the idea that this work is messy, I know from having done enough of it, that it is. It is sticky and circular and slow and crescendo-ing and yet—yet!—when I surrender to its current, it is so, so empowering.
It is letting myself pee when I orgasm is that’s what happens.
It is wounds and scars-smoothed-over and infant skin.
It is many, many truths—spoken.
It is feminine.
It is flowing.
It is real.
It is air and heart space and swirling, not spinning. It glides. When I am grounded in my inner feminine, the work glides like a feather caught on a shift of air.
