Having a hard time with titles tonight...

Was musing the other day about the difference between a blog and a journal.  I think a journal is a more intimate journey for the writer and the reader.  Blogs can be great information sources, can be entertaining, can be good escapes but blogs are not journals.  I haven’t come across a blog yet where after reading an entry or two or three where I say – I know him or I know her, what makes them tick.  Every blog I’ve read so far keeps things on a superficial level.  Who are these people really?  What gets their passions up?  What saddens them, what brings joy?  Why do they all try to be so clever?  It’s like we’re hiding behind cleverness instead of truth.  We build up layers and layers of skin,  masks to who we really are.  Are we afraid of revealing ourselves to the world or more importantly are we afraid of revealing ourselves to ourselves?  Are we afraid of our own rejection?  Can we reject ourselves?  Have we already?  Is that why we walk on by when we see pain, why we turn our heads away from the homeless man on the street but cause traffic slow-downs (if not crawls) when passing the scene of an accident?  Isn’t there pain in both situations?  Why do we choose to look at one and not the other?  Is it because in our insulated cars, we ‘feel’ as if we’re watching a movie or television show – but the homeless man sitting on the sidewalk asking for help looks you in the eye and there is no ‘monitor’ or glass between us – just humanity.  And why do we walk away from our humanity? Why do we cover our own needs up with cleverness, humor, makeup, anger, bitterness?  What is so scary about being at one with yourself?  When we open our hearts, lay them bare for the world to see, for our own eyes to see, we often see a child.  Our inner child, the pure one, the innocent one, the one who hasn’t learned to hate yet and we often see that child sad that he/she has been put away and ignored for so long.  When I opened my own heart to myself, re-examined things in my past, acknowledged decisions, and forgave myself, my ‘inner child’ cried with joy because she hadn’t been free in decades.  She had been pushed down, I often thought I had to be something, someone other than me.  I wished so hard sometimes to be just like someone else I admired – that I lost myself.  I wanted all the qualities I admired in others to manifest in me.  But I thought mistakenly that I had to relinquish my own essence to grasp those qualities.  Instead of just reaching down into my soul and releasing those qualities.  Because they were always there, just buried under a concrete wall and levee that even Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t have been able to penetrate or breech.  But who or what finally broke through my walls?  You would think that it would have been someone else but no, the architect of my walls was myself and I was the destroyer of those walls as well.  My soul, my inner child kept chipping at the stone for years, kept working its way toward my heart until I could no longer suppress my self’s desire to be free and to be loved for who I am.  And not loved by someone else but loved by me.  I had rejected my very being for the better part of my life and it was time to celebrate my self.  I can’t say that it was an easy process or that I’m done and all fixed now so that I’m overwhelmingly fabulous.  The process is/was/always going to be hard and that fabulous though I am, I can be ever so much more fabulous to myself.  I do welcome each day I’m blessed with with much more excitement than in years past. Each time I figure out something new about myself I get excited at the resulting clarity in thought.  I have had so many “ah ha” moments and with each subsequent layer or concrete block being removed, I experience not a feeling of vulnerability at the loss of my protective shield but a feeling of strength and dominance, my shield is my truth and acceptance of myself.  No one can change that.  Only me, and I don’t want to build concrete walls, levees or nuclear bomb shelters around my heart and soul.  My world has been so much richer these past few years I don’t want to go back to the way it was.  I like it as it is now.  I like me as I am now.