The Big Payback - duh duh da da duh duh da

Today, driving home, exhausted from working out to James Brown, I felt more myself than, maybe, I ever have. It was a moment of beautiful clarity. When I think about the way I behaved when I was younger - all the things I put up with, all the things I was embarrassed by, all the things I didn’t say – I know that I was stifling my true personhood. I was not fully myself. This is not saying that I shouldn’t have been who I was then. She was who I had to be in order to be who I am now. But this sense of contentment with myself now makes all of that angst worth something. I’m even comfortable with this liminal stage that I’m in.

I’d like to thank someone for this and the first person to come to mind is James Brown. However, I know in my heart that God gave me a framework to make my choices and to live my life within and the pattern created by those choices and experiences culminated in this feeling of total recognition.

The last week has been another emotionally intense week. I’ve been trying to get it into some cohesive, elegant writing, but since the intensity has resolved itself into this acceptance of myself, the impetus is less strong.

I’ve always loved the phrase from Fredrick Buechner, “. . . a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together that the chances either of them could have managed to become alone.” I had the entire essay that it comes from read at my wedding. I continue to believe that Buechner was right and that means that my marriage was not, since this current awareness of self exposes that I did not become more richly myself than I have managed to become alone. That is, strangely, comforting.