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