Inside me there are two wolves. One is a Puck figure, deeply convinced that anything worth doing is worth doing quickly and preferably should already be done. Send that risky text now! If that’s how you feel then that is how you feel! No filter just do it already! Post it on the secret blog! The other spins out into self-hatred at the slightest sign of an uncomfortable feeling, is socially anxious and deeply ashamed of being at all. That person is disgusted with you, there is no way they would want to be your friend! No one wants to be close to you because they could never care about you and also you are unreasonable and impossible to understand!

I’m trying to strike a balance between these forces right now, or at least to tame them so that I can see what is going on. They represent the far outer and deep inner manifestations of my personality and seem to be completely out of my control. I recognize in the far outer self an aspiration to wildness that I thought would solve all my social problems when I was young. I was cool, I was unpredictable, I wasn’t a good girl. I am still trying to understand the deep inner self. My best guess is that I’ve developed a preemptive self-rejection reflex that is stronger than anything I try to pit against it. The inner child lashes out and rejects herself before anyone else can. The wolves are the mask and the monster and I am caught in-between.

I have two looming fears as I enter my mid-thirties—rejection, and not ever having fully lived. These are kind of the same fear because they’ve sprung from the same life trajectory—I haven’t been doing the big things I‘ve wanted in my life because I’ve been focused on the pursuit of being chosen, which is the opposite of being rejected. I thought being chosen would fill the hole inside me that I now understand is unfillable, this yearning to believe I am a worthwhile person while also not wanting to risk anything. It’s an abyss where any validation I receive fades into black, hidden by the darkness that seeks to protect me, somehow.

Even as I write this I am irritated by the melodrama of these images, but this is really how I think. My therapist said recently that “it’s like [I’m] questioning my right to exist and be a person.” How can you not be melodramatic in the face of something so deep? I wish it weren’t this way, obviously, I wish I weren’t a wreck when I try to socialize, but at the same time I see the fun in being dramatic. The healed version of me has fun with having a psyche, they know that I am lucky to be me because I do things in the exact way that I like, and I have excellent taste in music, and my body is so generous in its care for me. I take the good with the bad, even though the bad is so extreme, because I love being here.

That brings me to the question I set out to write about: what does it mean to be fully alive? I am taking a class and this quote by Howard Thurman came up:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

I’ve been fascinated by this. What does it mean to come alive? Is it to awaken to the facts of your being? Is it just to awaken? I have a bumper sticker on my car that says “I AM HERE / I AM ALIVE” and I bought it because at the time I thought to myself “that will always be true.” But there is a question of magnitude. Lately I feel more alive than I did before, when I bought that bumper sticker at a show with my girlfriend two relationships ago. The world is wide open because I’ve committed to doing things that scare me. Not with the false bravado of the mask, but in a way where I can stay present and observe whether the things I’m doing are things that I actually want to do.

I went to a concert last night and the frontman of the band told us between songs that “music isn’t really good or bad, it’s either true or not true.” That’s a good place to start this inquiry from, as I traverse the wide path between my deep inner and far outer—what is true and how do I get closer to it? I know that the truth is worth the pain that comes from awareness, awakening, sensing. I know that the individual truth inside me will tell me exactly what makes me come alive. And I trust that is a good thing.