There was someone who became very important to me about ten years ago, someone who gave me the incredible experience of being totally accepted and loved and nurtured as myself, not as they would have me be. It was liberation, total commitment without terms and conditions, it was something that allowed me to recognize the vast and infinite being that we can be without having to become someone new.
I don't often talk about my personal life, because, hey, it's personal. However, this became such a prolonged experience that emerging from it requires, in my world, some formal recognition and expression of it. I need to acknowledge that it's happened, so that I can grow now, and forge a new world, a new path, and a new set of definitions.
People talk about fear being the enemy. But there's only ever been one thing to fear and that's loss. Loss of life, loss of limb, loss of soul, loss of love, loss of social position, loss of control - you name it, it's all about dealing with the hard-hitting and monstrous grief and frustration that comes from loss.
It's hard for me to admit that I hurt. That I got hurt. I lost someone who was so important to me, through no one's fault, that I spent the next ten years striving to create a life he would have been proud of. Living for a memory. I was aware of it, I never denied that to be true. I made that choice - and I made it consciously.
Yet I have achieved that, and he's not here. I am. And I'm having to deal with that sense of loss all over again.
It's different though now. As sad as it is, I'm still moving forward, I have grown, and there is possibility beyond that achievement. Now he can be a happy memory, because I've done what I had to do, I got to where I needed to be, and I can let go of its meaning. He's been living in a shoebox full of ambitions for the past decade - and he'll never know what I've gone through to give that a reason, a purpose. But I do. That's all that matters. Because I taught myself what I'm made of, and that is something he would have celebrated with me. Now I can grieve properly, and move on. Without feeling that I betrayed his faith in me, I can give everything to a new purpose. Through my loss, I now have freedom. Now I can say goodbye.