Chaos & Clarity

If I showed you who I want to be – showed you the stuff that makes my heart sing – you might laugh, and I would be regretful for exposing myself.  So I choose not to show you.  I keep my dreams, beautiful dreams, in a cocoon where they are safe.    I would rather hide them and protect them than risk losing them to ridicule.

I don’t dare to show you who I am inside because it’s the only part of me that I believe is beautiful.  And I don’t want you to tell me otherwise.  I’m afraid that if you see the real me, you won’t see the perfection and then I’ll have a decision to make – to believe your opinion or my own.  And, well, I haven’t always been convinced that my opinion of myself is accurate.  Because it’s hard to tell who’s right.

The me inside, way down deep, hasn’t been found out, not completely.  But sometimes it leaks out.  It can’t help itself.  It sees its reflection in a word, a thought, a loving expression, and it can’t contain all its beauty.  So it speaks or writes or sings or dances.  It wants nothing more than to share its magical vision.

Sometimes, when the beauty escapes, people say ‘ah’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘you are so wonderful.’  But the beauty is shy.  It scares easily.  It hasn’t learned to trust the world.  If the world sees how great it is, the world will demand more, on a schedule, and will expect its money’s worth.  The heart will learn to expect too.  And demand from itself.  And the heart will have to deliver even when it wants to rest in the quiet of its cocoon where it can hear the truth and replenish.

The heart can’t see clearly when people crowd around telling it this and that.  So it stumbles, and worries that people will be disappointed .  Maybe they’ll say, ‘You’re not so beautiful after all.’ And the heart’s fear will have been confirmed.

It’s safer then, to stay hidden inside.