Freedom of personal power is the morning freewrite-prompt. I do believe there can be greater freedom experienced if we embrace ourselves, accept who we are outside of the tyranny of others including what becomes, through media and socialization the norm. But this can be a difficult and ever-evolving process and even if we are practicing greater personal power in one area of our lives we might need to update other parts of our personalities.
We are in our own bodies, our own life and only we are the ones who can effectively choose to exercise our personal powers, or to allow others too. Commonly enough, many of us unconsciously project our problems with connecting to our personal powers onto our mates or families or parents-- if only you didn’t do this…or if I’d had a better upbringing, if I hadn’t suffered the abuse…
Yesterday afternoon, I spent some time going through a very full, retro-black, two-drawer filing cabinet in my bedroom. These papers are only mine, not for any kind of business, though there are some pretty thick files including civil rights, geography and poetry lesson-plans I have developed to teach my high school students and more on my dream training's and writing starts I’m not sure I’ll ever get back to.
Fine, I can keep these I thought to myself and there is the possibility I will go looking for them for use at some point, but there were years’ worth of insurance papers, tax forms, divorce papers, child support arrears and you dear reader, get the point. So I settled myself into the gray, shag rug on my wood floor and started to go through these files pretty quickly, creating a large pile of old, but what should be shredded and was able to clear the stacks accumulating on top of the cabinet and slide the two drawers closed after the manila envelope purge.
I carried the slippery stacks haphazardly down the stairs and opened the woodstove. Burning, a fire ceremony in honor of my own freedom from this guarded right of victimhood I was keeping safely tucked away, but projecting onto exes. I think because my ex-husband owed so much in child support and the uncontested divorce became an extended-over-years fiasco, I was keeping these papers safe so that my children might read of my not being guilty when they were adults with enough experience under their belts to understand their father was the liar and not me!
Wait?! Some part of me was still thinking like THAT?
But, until I looked again through the old files I wasn’t sure of my own long-standing perceptions that were keeping more than a few papers safely locked up. An updating that increased my personal freedom in releasing the past and opening to a power way beyond held resentments.
Excellent purge and good self reflection. It's hard to let go, but so necessary.
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