Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 1 — Birthday Week

“Nobody is perfect. I just don’t believe in perfection. But I do believe in saying, ‘This is who I am and look at me not being perfect!’ I’m proud of that.” Kate Winslet

My 54th birthday will forever be known as Birthday Week. It was exciting, exhilarating, and perhaps most of all, enlightening.

Several months before my birthday, I told Ginger it had been almost a decade since I was divorced and other than Scott, no one had ever approached me when I was out. And when Scott came over and introduced himself, I was with another woman who had been approached several times before while I was with her, so I had initially wondered if he really came over because of me. But I now had enough confidence that I could look at myself and at least think I was relatively OK looking, so it just seemed confusing that in that length of time there hadn’t been more than one man show any interest. While I was in a good place and getting comfortable with this new way of thinking and living with much less fear, it was a quandary to me that I wanted to figure out. I didn’t need to have a man in my life, and I didn’t want to work to get one by online dating, but I just found it odd, so I figured talking with Ginger about it couldn’t hurt. Ginger asked if perhaps I didn’t appear to be approachable. It resonated in the way I had come to dread, and I remember thinking, “Uh, oh...” That meant it was going to be something “I” had work on again. Easy answers every once in a while, would have been nice. But afte r that thought, it made me smile because I really didn’t mind doing the work anymore, I just liked to act like I did now and then. She asked me questions about how I thought I appeared to others when I was in public. Once I thought about it, I remembered feedback I had received years ago from colleagues during a team building exercise. They had indicated that in meetings I appeared to be mad or defensive because I would sit with my arms crossed. At the time, I couldn’t be honest with myself or anyone else, so I said I did that because I was cold. While that may have been true much of the time, it wasn’t the only reason. I didn’t feel comfortable or safe with that team, so I was often cold AND my body was seeking to feel safer as I protected myself by being as tightly within myself as possible in a meeting setting. Arms crossed over my chest, legs crossed tightly under the table, sitting straight up aware of all my surroundings at all times, just waiting to be “pounced” on even if it was only verbally, or at least that’s how it felt. My body language wasn’t only defensive, I was defensive when given the feedback th at I was defensive. Where was Ginger back then? At that time, I heard the feedback, but I couldn’t self -reflect enough to understand it. The good thing was, though, that I never forgot it either because now it was coming back to help me in this situation and that felt like something pretty easy, I could control when I was in public. Next, we talked about when I feel most myself, most authentically me and when I do not. We walked it through, and she wrote the following on the whiteboard, and I typed it into my phone so when I was going out, I could remind myself before I went in somewhere.

I lose my authenticity when I’m scared. What am I afraid of? Name it…is it true? Do I have evidence?

The third one held me accountable for not making stuff up in my mind, as was often the case when I was scared. I had to have tools to use because trusting my brain was still not something I could do in the moment . I could figure things out in retrospect, but this was a way I could proactively manage my behavior since walking into an unknown place with unknown people was still a challenge for me.

229