Illuminate.

Law school does not lend itself to leading a reflective life. I really have to push to make time to evaluate the choices I feel called to make; heck, I have to push to make time to evaluate my coursework, let alone the actual good, thriving messiness of love and relationships and God and the meaning of this house’s current infestation of fruit flies (here’s the kicker – sans fruit! Bastards! There are enough of them that I’ve officially taken to saying that they, en masse, make up our fourth roommate.) Realistically, I should be reading for EU or writing this article or drafting that outline, or or or…but it helps, now and then, to step back and admit that I don’t always know where it is I think I’m going; and what good is the process of going somewhere, anyway, if one forgets what purpose it serves?

This ties into my next point, which is that only recently – i.e., five minutes ago, when I started typing this paragraph – have I remembered the original reasons why I started blogging, and that is confession. There’s power in speech. There’s power in keeping silence, too, power in withholding intimacy or keeping secrets; this second choice is one we more readily pursue, although I personally believe it is the more dangerous of the two and stands the greater chance of being abused. In my own life, honesty often aligns itself with confession, with admitting that here. Here are my limits. This is how far I can go on my own. So long as one remains silent, that space is unbounded; potential appears to stretch as far as the eye can see. Honesty breaches that divide between imagination and reality; too often, we're afraid that what people love about us is what we can promise, not what we can deliver. Confession bridges that gap and sends the losers who are just in it for them out on their sorry, fat arses. (Notice I didn't just say "fat arse." I happen to have a special fondness for those, myself. No, my hatred is reserved for the sorry, fat arse. Out on the street they go! Towanda!)

When I began blogging, I had no readership; none of my friends knew this existed and certainly, my family did not know (what’s up, Jen?!). Now that I have people from every area of my life reading, I find myself semi-restricted by my own wish to control the image of me that they take away from this page. And now I’m realizing that my discomfort with any audience at all is just my own discomfort with admitting that, hey, I don’t have it all together. I mean, you all know that – but each group you represent knows that in a different way. Combine this desire to avoid being “weighed, measured, and found wanting” with my almost-unsociable love for privacy of a certain area of topics, and you’ve got one bland little blog for the reading public.

Man, I talk a lot.

So this is my confession to you, Internet, and I say it in the off-chance that you feel something of the same: I’ve been struggling with myself lately and my own almost-paralyzing fear of making choices. This weekend was a powerful one for showing that the choices I make now don’t determine everything; I can decide to become an EMT when I’m 60 (go, Chapman sisters’ Uncle Ken), and my life will be better for it. I never have to stop learning. I will never be “locked into” a career because, hey – that’s not me. I don’t have to go the route I’m expected to go. I don’t even have to – wait for it – become a lawyer with this degree. (!!! !!!) But the kicker has been that, as I'm slowly awakening to the idea that the reason all of my "options" seem unsuitable is that they are unsuitable in terms of who I wish to be on my deathbed, I find myself frightened by the idea of forging ahead on my own rather than being excited about the prospect of new territory, a thermos full of good coffee, and my trusty internal compass as my Guide. Maybe it’s the realization that $90K of loans don’t disappear overnight, but suddenly I find myself becoming quite skittish about The Future instead of eager for it. Where'd that sense of joie de vivre go? As my friend Mark would say, "The 1998 version of me would kick the 2005 version's a**." (Actually, 1998 was a cool chick; she'd kick 2005 around and then take it shopping, followed by Vietnamese and Petersen's ice cream. There would also be peanut sauce.)

This was on the back of Uncle Ken's downstairs bathroom door this weekend and proved an unexpected encouragement about thoughts I've been struggling through lately; namely, that I am not, after all, Very Brave:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not in just some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Nothing is easier than staking out your own map of the future, so long as someone else has provided the template; this little ditty helps me understand what’s holding me back. The Internet incorrectly attributes it to Nelson Mandela, but the real author is Marianne Williamson. Even my initial disappointment that some unknown said this, rather than a universally respected figure, is revealing: over the past year, I've become too content to have truth about Worth fed to me rather than taking things up in my hands and rolling them around to see how they match up. Too much credentialing -- which school? which firm? what grades? which internship? what career path? how much money? which offer? -- leads us to believe that the only system of worth we can impose is external, one chosen by other people. Here and now, I call myself guilty of the same.

Well. No more of that truck. Hold me to it: I’m reclaiming what I’ve parceled away in the hopes that one of these things—career, grades, leadership opportunities—would sate the beast of my own fear to fail. As always, ignoring the truth of who I am in all of that leads to unhappy results anyway. No, I’m not always supremely confident. I am often shaken. But I will—and this is a promise—remember that I do know, after all, how to boogey down. It may not be pretty, and it may not happen often, but it’s still dancing. (That was a metaphor, for all you lovers out there.)

And maybe I'll do it holding a candle, just to spice things up. Nothing says Good Times quite like awkward white girls, fire, and the rumba.