happyblog: open your heart

i'm really afraid of getting lost in this.

i mentioned in my first post that establishing (refining? refreshing? flexing?) my professional identity was happening simultaneously with falling in love. (well, i suspect that's what this is.) i mention it because they're related, and i think today i figured out how.

finding myself professionally is like hatching. pushing and kicking and scratching a space for myself in the world. violently struggling for substance in the ether. you feel me. right? and after 33 years of getting to know myself a little bit, i finally feel like i've got a grasp on what it is to be myself...so all the time gestating isn't wasted so much as it is servicing a greater existence. and i've gotten really good at fighting for myself. though i'll admit i've spent a lot of that energy fighting against myself, or against someone or something else. (ah, it's a vicious circle!)

so now i've got the battle skills, and i think i've identified the battlefield correctly. finally. maybe.

but here i am in a circumstance that demands a surrender. not unequivocal. not i-give-everything-you-give-nothing surrender, but i-give-everything-to-get-everything surrender. an opening. but i have this innate fear of getting lost in 1950s housewifery - the kind that inevitably drives women to disappear inside something or someone else...their superstar kids, their prototypical husband, their organic pickling...

i live in absolute terror of that sublimation. even though i'd like to be a domestic goddess, i'd rather make piles of cash and hire a nanny, a cook, a tutor, a personal shopper, a tailor, a driver, and a maid. because i don't want those jobs. i want to be a loving and devoted wife and mother, but i don't see all these roles coinciding in the way that ideal has been promulgated. if we're picking goddess archetypes, i'd take Artemis (Athena, even) over Hera every day!

and he wants me to be more myself at the same time as making lots of room for him. it's stretching in both directions. or maybe it's not stretching, so much as becoming fluid. gosh, even that sounds intimidatingly self-less. but i guess if i think of this like an element...and i feel myself elementally...

for the past couple days, i've been saying to myself "no one else can make you do something you don't want to." but i realize it's not someone else making me do things i don't want to...it's wanting to do things for this person that i don't want to do for anyone else (even myself)!

the point here is that i'm putting more of myself out there right now than i thought i could. i won't run out of any of this power, will i?

wow, this is related to everything.

xop