by metavision
Thu Feb 22nd, 2007 at 06:47:24 AM EST
This used to be a comment, before it grew into ...this and more to come.
To begin, I want to praise Jerome, whataboutbob and Keone (just come to mind right now) for having the courage to write about personal aspects appropriately and to say that I am really happy to see caring support from everyone. ET is about improving the system, but we can also be about helping each other, unashamedly.
In the so-called, western civilization you almost have to be an acrobat to maintain the proper balance of trust and personal defenses, unless you have a very healthy support system. I don´t have it.
We drag around, some more gracefully than others, a bank vault of feelings and experience while pretending it doesn´t exist and that nobody will notice it. In fact, most of the time, most people agree to ignore that overwhelming sense of the elephant in the middle.
We lock the "personal" part away from the "public" part to protect the painful areas in our lives, as if they were unique, when most of them are really parallel. Actually, people who do not admit to have lived through personal crisis, seem uninteresting. We create a firewall to protect them and treat them as --short or tall, more or less decomposed-- skeletons in our closets. At the same time, that defense mechanism becomes a black hole of energy/knowledge that remains unused.
Revealing intimate details is unnecessary because everyone needs a shell and a clear boundary in every role. But I am suggesting we put some of that unused energy/knowledge into our public efforts, instead of perpetuating what has become an excessive "privacy" taboo that only creates degrees of separation.
I can stand up to scrutiny, and have, but who would want to, when others sit in judgment, claiming their immaculateness? I could be a burned risk-taker, but I have progressed a lot in trust-judgment and I have enough faith in the ET unspoken parameters, to reveal some personal experience, beyond initials after my name. The time when I planned my future by the initials I wanted on my business card is long gone.
So, not without some resistance, I will write about life in my universe, where being on my own makes it easy to lose perspective and difficult to maintain balance. I am probably writing to convince myself that I can still make big plans --I am turning 56 any minute now-- and that, if I work at it, I may come up with a "simple" formula to make them work.
Can I fly the coup for the third? time? How do you protect and balance yourself? How do you build a healthy support system?
