So I have a few posts that I am not confident in publishing. A piece I wrote last year (and have since deleted from this blog) stirred up some people. It is not hard to write from a personal perspective, but it is challenging to publish it. Normally I wouldn't mind stirring people up, but when you are writing about your feelings and experience it is always subjective and always leaves you open to attack.
I have thought about the goal or purpose of this writing. I write for myself often, and I have been content keeping it to my self. In the social networking culture we find ourselves in everyone has an important opinion and feels the need to voice it, regardless of how self centered or myopic it may be. I don't want to be the blogger mom that posts about how June Cleaver I am, or how Martha Stewart my Christmas tree looks, or how amazingly I have raised my child in the absence of hardship or struggle. I couldn't write like that even if I wanted to!
The title of this blog is Evolution of Erica. It reflects my change in behavior, speech, views, coping strategies, etc after leaving a Christian cult. During the time I have been exploring this transformation it has become clear that my need to defer decision making to someone else began long before I met the family who brought me to that church.
Where does one begin when I am still uncomfortable recalling memories, let alone sharing them with the world at large? I think sharing our experience with others seems to be lost. We don't get together with friends to talk, we check our news feed. We have long conversations where facial expressions and body language is missed and emojis are a poor substitute. Some people don't even talk on the phone anymore. We miss out on the human contact and experience behind our keyboards and screens. We are able to keep up the facade of a happy little life with carefully selected photos, status updates, and threats of unfriending if you don't take the unflattering photo down. This is a manner of behaving that I had no trouble adjusting to once I left the cult. But to be honest I became good at that at a much earlier age. Being authentic is hard. Opening up is hard. Learning what to say and who to say it to is difficult. Like most other lessons I have learned, this came to me the hard way. While I am not publishing my deepest thoughts or closely held secrets, I still think sharing our stories and experience is a worthwhile and noble pursuit. Many people I talk to express a frustration with life that is common no matter what the background. Being human is a communal activity, it can be accomplished in a vacuum, but just like using the microwave cooking directions, it may not turn out the way the way you thought.
So here I am wasting a beautiful day in my hot kitchen trying to type out a post on a touchscreen keyboard. Auto correct is the bane of original thought, in my opinion. Why am I doing this? Because I believe if we share our experience we will see the world as a more friendly place. We will see more in common with our neighbors and coworkers than we did before. We can help others by lowering our walls and saying, "Me too!". We are not unique. I have not experienced one thing in my crazy life that has not happened to a single other person.
So this isn't a deep post with some altruistic message. This is my mission statement for this writing experiment. I want to share my experience because I can help someone feel, even just momentarily, that they are not alone in their experience of life. And that ties into my belief that our collective purpose as human beings is to lessen the suffering of others.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for my thoughts on courage.
