Dear Pneuma,

I have been a crab recently. I have been hyper-critical of people and events, strongly vocal about the ways in which they have not met my expectations. What is it about a turn of thought, that takes righteous indignation and reveals it for silly selfishness? I have been searching for self-fulfilling activities and relationships in the wrong places, which is why I have not been finding them. At the same time, I have misunderstood the true goals behind jumping the hoops of silly bureaucracies: investments in skills and contacts that will support me for the future.

I have thought that my activity was meant to fulfill me. Instead, my activity has been ground work for living into a new role and status. This role and status is not me-not personally, spiritually, or authentically an expression of myself, but it is a part of the commitment that I have made with my Beloved. It is an expression of the entity created when we got married.

No matter what actions, decisions and relationships I choose, there is a part of the world that will have and voice opinions about me that directly relate to the role and status that I now have in society. My choices, then, for the last few months, have been influenced by that role and status. The machinery of people's carefully constructed order has been using the lens of role and status to interpret my actions, my words, and my meaning to this community. I will never be "myself" in this structure, because it defines me in categories I neither understand nor care much about. It cannot "hear" or "see" me. Yet, there is a self that is imaged here, a self that impacts both me and my Beloved.

How the community views my Beloved is closely related to how the community views me, using its lens. I have no control over that lens. Believing that lens actually has the power to define and judge me has been causing a great deal of dissatisfaction, but if I release myself, and allow the relationship identity to engage with people instead, I predict that I will be less angry and dissatisfied with the nature of relationship with those I have been meeting. I can turn a need for self-fulfillment and personal connection into the power to support my Beloved's call. The self created by others' definition can then relate to those others in ways they understand, allowing me the freedom to control whether that image is a creation of integrity and largesse, or a bundle of insecurities and petty dominions.

In the meantime, I will still need community and relationship. I work too hard at loving life to turn my soul over to duty or expectation. Therefore, I will seek out friends. I will search for people who think, feel, laugh and play in synergy with me; people that treasure absurdities; people that tell dirty jokes and use profane language; people that have opinions, hopes, and dreams that coincide with mine; people that do not know me by a role or a status beyond the role of person and the status of friend.

I have to admit to some sadness. I had hoped that I could be real here, but maybe my life is a sequence of public and secret selves: each authentic, each real, but each incomplete. Maybe it is only with my true intimates that the whole person can be shared, and that authenticity of action and intention is sometimes best costumed in someone else's clothes.

Let me know if you think I am wrong.

Love you,
Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I love my life! Being a grown-up is often difficult, but the rewards are enormous. I do not mean material rewards such as a house, alcohol, or a driver's license. I mean life rewards such as strength, confidence, and self-identity. These past months, I have been engaged in a process. I have been testing relationships, reacting to new situations, feeling grief, and reflecting on what kind of person I want to be. In terms of being grown-up, I have been taking responsibility, making commitments, accepting change and loss, and choosing right action over comfortable patterns of behavior. Hard, but wonderful, all the same, to rediscover who I am, and what I need.

Tonight, I clearly articulated my desires to another person. Tonight, I heard a loved-one's concerns without losing my own self-assurance. Tonight, I felt empathy for another person's problems, without the need to try and fix them. Tonight, I expressed annoyance with a situation, without attributing blame. Tonight, I reasserted the lesson that I can live without the approval or understanding of those closest to me.

I like myself again. I like my flaws and my uncertainties. I revel in the fact that I am a person, not a thing; not a trophy of someone else's achievement; not the yard stick for anyone else's satisfaction. Because I am claiming responsibility for my actions, my choices and my state of being, I am free to reject the burden of anyone else's. I am free of past relationships and first relationships. I am free to turn from them. I can let them flourish or flounder without me. Loosing them, I lose childish expectations and the past's definition of my self. I do this with love and gratitude.

Loving now,
Cobalt Dreams