Saying yes to my whole self, one FB group at a time.

I write best when I write about my life, but it seems so very new age and narcisstic to make it all about me. And maybe it's just delusion to pretend it's not. I got the idea of doing this blog and podcast last spring and have been chipping away at the pieces since then. Sometimes I forget that I am not a homemaker anymore, with naptimes to sit and write and create. But instead trying to put together the pieces of my personal life in the pauses between work and running errands. And supposedly age catches up to you. This may be true, but I don't feel ready to buy that completely. Someone called me middle-aged last week and I politely, but firmly, corrected them rather quickly. It's not that I mind aging, it's just that I mind aging.

One of my college bff's and I started an online reunion group on FB. I didn't expect it to be quite as much fun as it is (or full of quite as many terrible pictures of me-- how come the only times people took my photo were when I was chill-axing instead of when I was dolled up on a date?) I went to college at Brigham Young University (BYU) a mormon school and now I work as a queer activist. So saying yes to the past and yes to my present has been something I have struggled with since the day I came out in Feb of 1998. I couldn't say yes to all of myself at the time. I needed to leave my past behind in a heap on the floor to embrace this new part of myself. I made peace with it, but I left it behind and have felt the shape of it within me ever since. So today I am saying yes to my past and my present. Embracing the mormon student and homemaker within and the queer activist committed to social justice. I couldn't be here today without being who I was in 1992. And yet I had a fear within myself that I couldn't stand in both places. When they started a thread asking what people are doing today and I wrote "Exeutive Director at LGBTQ Center in Boulder, CO" without fear, I knew I finally could.