The unedited self

I listened to Glennon Doyle's We Can Do Hard Things podcast yesterday afternoon. I'm not caught up on my listening, so it was an episode from a previous week. In it, they talked about Glennon's emergence as a writer. It all started when someone else shared a 'tell everyone 25 true things about yourself' letter, and she decided to go along with it, happily writing and then sending out her 25 things -- and then discovered she'd accidentally set off a torrent of raw and important truth telling because the things she shared were, unlike the mostly fluffy surface facts that others had shared, vulnerable and deep and life-shaping. After that, she began writing every day, and then sending it out into the world for others to see, eventually settling on the form of a blog, allowing herself to share her undivided and unedited self, and I felt like maybe, just maybe, I might have found some footsteps to follow in. Listening to them talk about it, I felt like this was what I've been trying to find. A way to be my true and real self through creating, without sacrificing the social boundaries that we all need in order to know where we end and others begin. 

This, together with another episode today with Tarana Burke and the idea of needing to get our truths out of our bodies in order to release them and not carry them as burdens and bonds... That episode made me feel like she described feeling, when she first encountered Dr. Angelou. She talked, too, about documenting her joy. Releasing secrets, documenting joy, sharing the self undivided. 

Maybe there's something to this. Maybe I can make a commitment, work some of it out. Maybe if I can make a commitment, then I can build a habit and then I can discover it's the habit for me.