Charades

The purpose of this blog was initially many-fold.

The first was to commune with a certain angel. The second was to get my thoughts out of my head. The third was to force myself to rigorously review and work my thoughts, through the written discipline. The fourth was to leave a record of myself for my daughter to hold if she so wanted. And the final reason was to commune my thoughts and photos with others.

Somewhere in the last year or so I think I subconsciously decided to ‘out’ myself with friends and family by making them aware of my blog.

Why? Well I think I had decided that at 50 years of age I was no longer interested in pretending to be an edited version of myself, one which was designed for their comfort and not mine.

This was in fact a process of filtering out those people that wouldn’t like the real me.

And if you think about it, why would I spend my precious time on this planet pretending to be something I am not just so that other people that I know aren’t made to feel uncomfortable or angry?

And the wonderful thing is that in the process of outing myself I have been judged harshly by some. Which is to say there are people out there that previously counted me as one of their tribe that have been quite ready to dislike the person that I really am. Which means of course they never really liked or respected me in the first place.

My favourite book of all the ones that they made me read at school was Henry the 4th Part 1. And my favorite quote which I can recall to this day reads, quite pertinently, as follows.

“I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.”

Well, it has pleased me greatly to break through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle me.

Part of the journey of course was to learn to worry not about being ‘wonder’d at’. Hal was quite young when he was supposed to have muttered these words and didn’t understand that breaking free actually means breaking free of the perceptions of others.

In my PhD thesis I added my favourite quote to the title page, as was the habit of the day. By Henri Bergson it read ‘Allow me to furnish the interior of my head as I please, and I shall put up with a hat like everybody else’s.’

Well, I am no longer interested in putting up with a hat like anyone else’s but I will continue to furnish the interior of my head as I please, thank you.