I experienced something rather eye-opening today. Either I’d forgotten how conservative I truly am, or I’d forgotten that the majority of people in my demographic are very liberal. Either way, an e-mail I received surprised the hell out of me.

Then I started thinking about it, and realized that I’ve let myself become shallow.

There’s still the navel-gazing, breaking events and thoughts and feelings into pieces and analyzing them, but lately I’ve kept it inside myself. I have a difficult time these days determining if I’m doing it out of a newly-discovered respect for my own dignity, or just plain fear of others’ opinions. Especially the ones I want to write about.

The more I stand in one place, thinking and analyzing, the more I see the history I never wanted to experience in the first place. If I randomly choose a number of days, months, years to jump backward in my personal history, I can find so many things I wish I’d done differently. Times I should have walked away, times I should have stayed. Times I should have been stronger, times I should have been more vulnerable.

It’s true that the past cannot be changed, but the hard part comes when it’s time to accept what happened and how it changed your life - whatever “it” is.

I have journals detailing my trip through this life on a near-daily basis since 1998. Melissa always joked that there were several places she knew she was immortalized - the DMV, her college records, the Bureau of Statistics - and now my journals. She’s right. I have books and books and pages and pages of thoughts and questions and woes and joys recorded for … for whom? For posterity? For my son to read?

Good God, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

Early on I determined there was no point in keeping a journal if I’m not going to be excrutiatingly honest. All those fears and hopes that we all have as human beings - the ones we usually keep locked inside our hearts or our heads - have been written out.

When it got bad - I mean really, really bad - I kept writing. I committed to paper some of the worst moments of my life. Moments I’d created, I’d been subject to, or just had a hand in. And now they just hang out there.

There’s a danger in committing everything to writing. And there’s also a danger in exposing it - anywhere. I’ve been wondering if I’m just feeling the danger signs or unconsciously trying to avoid the subject entirely.

I always wondered what a musician must feel like when he (or she) writes and records a song about an ex- that becomes fabulously popular, and they are duty-bound to perform this song night after night in front of thousands of people. Of course, I always wondered if Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park had experienced the same relationship I had before he wrote the songs for “Hybrid Theory” as well.

Judging from “Hybrid Theory”’s follow up, “Meteora,” I’d pretty much say he and I are in the same place - still. The major difference is this: I don’t have to rap my journal in front of thousands of people every night. Unfortunately, Linkin Park’s fame-and-fortune is intricately entwined with Shinoda’s broken heart. That has to suck.

One thing that concerns me about forcing my way down from the shallow stuff is that I’ve already committed so much of my recent painful history to writing. It’s a portion of my journal I won’t even skim through again - not for a long, long time. Why would I want to continue documenting things while I’m living through yet another “difficult patch”?

Instead of writing about what’s important to me - struggles with my business - serious ones - struggles with my ex-, struggles with my son, and the flat-out killer of 2003: struggles with my parents - I end up writing about stupid shit. I’m afraid of writing, perhaps, because I’m still afraid of hurting people. The line between hurting someone and being honest continues to run blurry for me.

I need to let go of self-protection again. I will not continue to live being afraid someone will not like my opinions, my thoughts, and my perceptions of the way things are. Strange e-mails aside, I think the only way to grow is to continue being honest with myself, and with other people - even when it’s not what they might want to hear.

Curious again,

michelle