AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!
Can I be here and still move forward "out there"?
Can I find balance in an off-kilter world where everything around me seems forever to be sliding just out of the picture? Fred Astaire found a way to dance on the ceiling and I gotta ask myself.........
Couldn't I do it too? Is life really just a good camera angle and a trick of the light? Don't we sort of construct our own sets, play out our own scenes, assume characters that suit the whim, the person or the moment?

A recurring statement I've been hearing people make for years speaks to the idea of being "authentic"......
of "self-actualization" and being "true to yourself". I have tried, through most of my life, to ask myself the difficult questions and then face the answers whether I liked them or not. I think I've been pretty fearless about facing up to my better angels and lessor demons.......
But looking back on it now, it seems a bit far-fetched to think that anyone could really be true to themselves. Not because we're inherent liars or anything like that; more that "ourself" is a being in constant evolution. How can you be self-actualized if your "self" is actually changing virtually every day of your life? Would you even want to be the same you that you were 5-10yrs ago? And how sad would it be to answer yes to that question because you haven't even grown enough to know you haven't grown at all? If all or any of that is, in fact, true then isn't the thing to aspire to really just the act of being truthful about who you are now and then be willing to fight to keep being that person as you learn to evolve into the next. From birth to death we are constantly in flux......... as is everything around us. We take more on as we learn to manage it and leave behind the things we outgrow because they are no longer what is real for us now. Am I less of a friend or a wife because I'm not the same wife, the same friend that I was 10 or 20 yrs ago? NO I AM NOT!!!!!
I'm a completely different person so how could I possibly be the same anything I have ever been.....
The only new year's resolution I have ever made, it always seemed so bloody ridiculous to me (if you're going to be a "better" anything BE IT NOW...... if you fail today TRY AGAIN TOMORROW) if you need a special day to make a change for the better about yourself or your life than you never really, truly wanted to do it in the first place. Anyway, my one resolution was that I would learn one new thing every day of my life up to and including the day that I die. I've tried really hard to live up to that, even when the thing I learned was that which I would have paid dearly to have missed out on altogether. Throughout all of those experiences and all of the lessons, ideas, realities, morals and pieces of information; the one constant has been that I have always been changing.

Perhaps it's true that I do take a role, play a part and assume an identity; to the degree that I am always a kind of reflection to those that I see. I do not, in any way, mean to imply that I am the least bit disingenuous in ANY of my dealings with anyone or anything. But I am very aware that my "what you see is what you get" methodology doesn't preclude the fact that EVERYONE SEES SOMETHING DIFFERENT. It's quite likely that, although he loves me enormously, my husband sees me as a bit of a control freak......... and to some degree that's true. My mother, on the other hand, has told many OTHER people that she thinks I may be one of the most brilliant women she has ever known........ but she still gets into the passenger seat of our 95 Lincoln AND GIVES ME DIRECTIONS ON HOW AND WHERE TO DRIVE!!!!! I don't now and may never know how my brother really feels about me.....
we have a really hard time communicating in a way that is successful for either of us. I do know that in high school he thought I WAS A GREAT BIG HO!!! *smile/lol* What my friends (if that's really what they are and sometimes I'm not sure) see is likely something entirely different and who knows what that is.

Where I'm going with this is that, as a constantly evolving, ever-changing, semi-professional "dancer on the ceiling of my life"....shouldn't I be able to choose my own music? Ann Davis (former Gov. of Texas) once said that "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high-heels!" What a lovely metaphor for me in my own life. I have always been dancing backwards to the rest of the crowd............
So I guess I'll keep doing that......
Only now, I'll be doing it in a different room (that would be here guys)! But I will, without question, have to work on doing it with balance. Cause damn, I'm way too old to be dancing until my feet bleed!!!!!!

I love you guys, I love it here and it is clear to me that this is the ONLY place it is ok for me to keep Molly alive in me. To talk about her like her presence will always be with me. To talk about her like she deserves. No one else wants to hear it. My grief and my memorializing makes them uncomfortable and they are ready for me to be over it now. But I'm not ready. And I'm also not ready to give up a place that has allowed me to express myself in a fashion that I have been missing for years. BUT I HAVE TO FIND BALANCE! It is as imperative to find it in the way I live out my life as it is for me to find it inside myself. So I guess that's the challenge.......... To find balance. To be able to be here and still go "out there" and move forward. Ideally, with some kind of grace and presence of mind.

So I guess you can take the gal out of the "cyber-world" but you can't take the cyber-world out of the gal...........
.................... and somewhere, Molly is snickering!

I miss you Midget. Little Luna is as afraid of his own shadow as he is everything else around him. I think it was too soon. I think I'm just comparing him to you and that's not fair to any of us. But I will be good to him in your honor. I will be patient with both he and I. And I will always be looking for you in my dreams............