Image by _Chelsee

This post is going to be a bit more personal than some of my others.  I want to dig a bit deeper into who I am and share with you.  I’m baring a rather intimate piece of who I am because I think many people, men and women, can possibly relate or at least find a piece of themselves in what I am going through.

I am generally an open person.  I think I’m fun, loyal, outgoing, cheerful and pretty open about who I am and what I think (perhaps too open! – my mother always told me to stop saying what I thought!).  I wear my emotions on my sleeve and there is nothing I can do to hide it.  Believe me, I learned ages ago never to play poker – I can bluff worth a damn.  But.  There is one aspect of my life that I’m not so open with.  My heart.

Growing up I was teased and bullied about being the “fat girl” a label I still carry in my own head to this day.  No one else, incidentally, sees that in me, or so they say and in my more rational moments, I truly believe this.  It’s really me who holds onto that label.  That label has made me feel judged for years.  Decades if I must come clean about my age!  As open as I am, I still have a fear of someone else besides me applying this label. And because of that, you get the very open, cheerful, warm person as a friend, or you can get me physically as a kissing partner in a bar or a one night of fun.  You rarely get both.  Actually, no one has ever gotten both, until maybe lately.

Don’t get me wrong, that last bit makes it sound like I have line ups of men waiting for me.  Far from the truth.  And anyone who tried to even hint at getting closer, I shut them down and push them away.  Basically I hurt them before they hurt me.  Any way you slice it, my experience is often more like “experience”.  But slowly I’m realizing that in order to get a different result in life, I have to put myself out there.  And not just in my usual outgoing self way, but on a whole other level.

So I did.  I opted to open myself up emotionally and physically to see what I would get.  I got something great in return.  It felt good to let down my barriers, to let someone in and to open up myself.  It felt rewarding to open myself up and find that someone liked me and know that it was for me.  All of me – my wine drinking, sarcastic, no socks, mouthy, country-listening, redneck, flirty me.  I may have screwed it up in the end, but I am trying to be open with all of me.  I’m trying so very hard to give myself over to the process of getting to know someone else, to open myself up to possibilities instead of shutting them down and shutting them out because I ran the risk of getting hurt.  If I screwed this up, I will hopefully chalk it up to my own silliness, I will learn from it and do my best not to make the same mistake again.

But, I may too, be rewarded for having been genuine in my reaction (and believe me, it was oh so genuinely Karen – good/bad/ugly and tears which get cried at virtually everything) or for eating humble pie which I believe I will be required to do.  No matter the actual outcome.  My goal is to remain as open, honest and real as I can be with those around me and with myself.  Experience what I feel and what’s around me, be true to the emotions and explore them.

So while I would never dream to tell you that tomorrow’s outcome doesn’t matter, because it does, greatly, I will also tell you that the greater the risk, the greater the reward.  If I find myself having lost out tomorrow, I will be sad and hurt and wishing for a different outcome.  My friends will listen to me make tearful promises that I will do things differently if only the gods can see fit to give me another chance and they will wrestle my phone away from me when I want to make silly, desperate, whiny phone calls or texts.  But if I get to keep what I think I may have found, I will be overjoyed, grateful and ecstatic.

Either way, I will have learned about myself, the world around me and have a deeper knowledge of my capacity to live, love and survive.  And I will get to revel in the fact that even for a very short time, someone liked me for me – all of me.  And that, my friends, is something I so rarely can say that I’ve felt.