Sitting at my table, six chairs surround it all. Who will come to dinner tonight, what shadows mark my wall? Fear, disappointment, happiness, or joy? Worry, lonliness, or laughter? Who will take the floor? They take turns knocking, sometimes they overflow. The only thing I’ve found to do is let them have their say. Then at last they take a bow and kindly fade away.

But to make the space and time for them is often hard to come by, so they run amuck inside my head until I say enough! Tonight I’ll entertain the ones who will kindly take a seat. Show your face, pick a place, kindly wait your turn. Now which of you has been interrupting all my precious sleep?

Six chairs tonight, I take up one, not enough left for everyone. It’s standing room only, so be quick you simple ones. The longest attending one I see sits across from me. I know him by a few names, his face and place constantly change just as the sea. Sometimes he sits so close to me. He smothers all the others. It’s on these nights his breath is heavy and he blows out all my wicks. The wicks that light the dancing shadows that move along in time with a song known as hope. Those nights I know his name as Lonliness, he threatens in the dark.

Other nights, like tonight, he takes a seat afar. Sitting opposite of me, he shares in the entertaining, of all the other attendees as they dance and cry, or yell. He never really ever leaves, a companion in the flames. On such nights as these, he calls himself Contentment. He sits with me, secure in all the noise of quiet bliss, while other voices sing their song, and shadows dance upon my wall. We sit and listen in the space, to the feelings that grace my place with the presence of their face.

Who will come to dinner tonight? What voice will represent? Longing, joy, excitement, pain, or bitterness with regret? Laughter, sorrow, worry, dissapointment, wonder, or the one we know as fury? Love, kindness, nostalgia, peace, or harmony? Melancholy, passion, zest, or grief? Terror, lonliness and shame, or frustration, desire, hope? And still I wonder, do these guests I know have dinner at your table?

“You either walk into your story and own your truth, or you live outside of your story, hustling for your worthiness.

-Brene Brown “Rising Strong”

I have a blog. I have succumbed to the world of web. Just like everyone else-or so it feels. It’s the hip happening thing to do, everyone has one except for me, I don’t. I have turned up my nose, run away in fear at the thought that I might have something to say or heaven forbid that my thoughts might be read by someone else. I hid from the idea, burried the thought and avoided the idea because of fear.

And here I sit in front of my computer writing to an unknown void about my heart, on a blog. After posting simple little blips here and there over the last few years on my facebook page, I found myself reading comments from friends that I should start a blog. I sort of blew it off with a brisk non-chalant “we shall see where it goes”, with no real intent to pursue the thought of actually doing anything beyond a few posts a year. And fear that if I did I would be tricking the world, stepping into a space where I didn’t belong. Hello Imposter Syndrome! My hiding was layered in pretense, fear, posing as something I most definity wasn’t and couldn’t be. “A writer”.

In my professional life as a Speech-Language Pathologist I tell stories, I work on verbs and I teach langauge skills with questions like: “What do you call a person who writes? A writer”. The word writer in itself does not imply any other attributes to describe the type {skilled, good, bad, professional, laymen, clinical, boring, narcissistic, self inflated, fake, valuable, etc} and yet I found myself replacing the word “writer” with the attribute as more important and always with negative context. WHOA.

I journal often, I crave the outlet. It’s the place I set things I don’t know what to do with. It’s the place for all the things that take up space in my life, the things I feel, struggle with, the feelings that exist within me in their unrefined state before they can be named and processed. I kept all of those places to myself for years and slowly I started sharing some of them and this shocking thing happened. People started saying “Me too” and I realized two things; I wasn’t alone in my humaness and by sharing my real self others told me it helped them.

I have a blog. I am not an imposter. I am not a poser nor an impersonator. I am a writer. I am facing my fear of stepping too wide and jumping too far that I fall on my face at the expense of my vulnerability. I am choosing to walk into my story, picking up a simple label that “I am a writer” with the hope that in doing so, what I share through my journey of swimming in the depths and wrestling with the monsters I find there, I will surface with new perspective and by sharing that struggle it’ll create a ripple that goes beyond the splash touching others with a “Me too”, and that is the whole point of this thing called being human.