MUSINGS

How do we live life truly and be able to submerge ourselves in our experiences and feelings without holding back for fear of being different, for fear that we won’t be understood?

I always knew that I was not fully the same or to better put I felt different truly different, not the cute kind not the kind that every girl likes to believe herself to be. It was the kind that we don’t like to say out loud, the one that makes our tummy turns and looks at ourselves in the mirror and wonder what was wrong and just maybe we were sick upstairs. I’m Linda and I’m a girl trying to find my way in life. I asked my mom a few days ago why I wasn’t like my little sister or other girls my age, not out of jealousy or spite but true curiosity. I looked smaller than my age acted and felt younger than I was and I hated it at times. I wanted to look my age, to not be asked who was the oldest when walking with my siblings to not feel so uncomfortable in my skin, to walk and not feel like all eyes were on me; to be confident and carefree but I wasn’t that girl. I was scared, scared of life and people in it; scared of love and what the future holds for me, of the inevitable or the unseen. Life scared me and people scared me of their reactions that I could not predict the way tempers could easily switch and not know the right thing to say. I am scared but I hope not to be one day. To find myself and to be me and to be unapologetic being the person I am, but I’m not that person yet for now so till then I’m going to go through life with my philosophy, not letting other people’s experiences define my own or the way I intend on living my life.

I am a Christian or well as Christian as the next person but that doesn’t mean I didn’t believe, not because I am expected to or I grew up conditioned to believe, I believed because I wanted to, because I like the peace and content that comes with believing, it’s a peace I haven’t found anywhere else, one that always dragged me back to him. But that didn’t mean I was a true Christian no, I was far from it because I couldn’t help but question things at times, lots of things, why things are the way they are, why women were treated the way they were, why some decisions were made, a never-ending series of why. I felt it was a flaw of mine that I could never fully blindly believe, believe without question and I pinned it to another inadequacy of mine, a flaw of some sort; another reason why I was different and I hated it, so whenever I did find my way back to God it didn’t last it never did and it hurt me: another inadequacy, another hole that couldn’t be filled.

So now this girl who is searching for herself and her light just accepts that these might not be flaws and just maybe they were questions in her being that she needed to find answers to, and her being different was not a crime or fault it was who she was and she needed to know who being “her” meant, so let’s hope for her sake she grows to speak without fear and she finds herself and the life she wants, one where she doesn’t have to conform or fear because without finding her self she could never be free.