Being a round Peg in a Somewhat Square World.....

“There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout:
This is me damn it! I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love! I am a whole complex package. Take me... or leave me. Accept me - or walk away! Do not try to make me feel like less of a person, just because I don't fit your idea of who I should be and don't try to change me to fit your mold. If I need to change, I alone will make that decision. When you are strong enough to love yourself 100%, good and bad - you will be amazed at the opportunities that life presents you.”  Stacey Charter

I have always felt different.

Always felt like perhaps, the world saw me as weird.....and sometimes they did and do.

Some folks say this state of living is like being a square peg and trying to fit in a round hole....

for awhile I may have thought that, too.

As a kid, I loved to read, loved any kind of art, loved to make up stories and write them down.

It wasn't until I went to school that I found out that not every kid copied stuff out of the encyclopedia's and that not every kid could  find a picture mingled  in the midst of some ordinary item laying on the floor....I was one of those people who might have found  the Holy mother's face burned into my grilled cheese bread--if I'd know who the Holy Mother was back then, I'm sure I'd have found her....I probably did find Santa or the Easter Bunny at some point!  I loved music.....any kind of music.....I have always been taken to another universe by the swirling and bashing of electrons hitting synapses, moving and breaking through space to create a mystical note in my ear. 

....and I've always been a people watcher....i can remember all the way up through college, i could name the outfits each person wore to school for each day of the week--obviously my teachers did not have enough to keep me busy.....and then there was my heart....I've always had a tender heart which caused me to always want to fix whatever seemed wrong with the world--I did learn to carry that weight on my shoulders and back and in my body.

I was smart....loved words...words of all kinds...and I never thought I couldn't do something because i was a girl like many of us in the sixties and seventies in the South were taught.....

anything a boy could do...I'd be damned if i couldn't do it too.

I have always had the nerve to ask the hard questions....even when others did not like it

about church, community, race, sexual orientation, politics, and life....--

and for the most part....

I held myself back,

bound myself up...

and lived fully by myself....never exposed fully to the world...

It was as if I were a square peg crammed down into the round hole of normal..

and for the most part...it was pretty uncomfortable.

Now years later...I stand boldly in my tie-dyed t-shirt and biker shorts as a proud bigger girl in the gym...and most days i think I look sexy hot--other days--sexier hotter.

I still ask the hard questions and people still don't like it but I don't care anymore
....I still travel to adventurous heights with the resonance of good music and sound,

I keep my mind busy with good books, friends who challenge me and a family who loves and accepts me fully as the "counter cultural slob that I am".---except sometimes my kids roll their eyes when i do something they consider weird in front of their friends.

I still challenge the "box of normal"..still try to crack it open...

i am learning to temper the rebel inside

and I have opened my heart fully to the world without having to carry the burden of fixing the world on my shoulders.....

I now stand fully comfortable in the fullness of all I was created to be.
.realizing that there is still untapped potentiality bubbling inside of me.

There has  been a switch in me flipped..

a new way of thinking...

and

I stand fully exposed to the world...

 confident in my own intellectual abilities and weirdieties....

I like myself...I am my own best friend and worst enemy  all at the same  time..and I love both sides of me...

now i don't mean to be sounding all "cocky" but I've decided that after all this time of thinking i was the Square Peg trying to make myself fit in the round hole--
 that perhaps i was looking at it all wrong...

I think the world is a bit square in its box filled with stigma, power and ego...

The box of normal....makes folks feel okay...keeps people's uniquenesss pushed and tied and bound up....

keeps all the cards all  in their rightful place...

i say the world has it wrong....and that I've had it wrong for a bit....but no more...

Being Colorful and Round  is cool..
.and now i walk fully and proudly as

the tie dyed, bigger girl question rebel with a pastorly heart....

I like my roundness in the square world ...I don't care who doesn't....

I personally think the the world is a bit square and most don't know what to do with a

round, colorful peg like me...but I'm willing to teach them..

Go boldly into the world and as Cyndi Lauper sings,

"Let your true colors......show"  Go on Be Like the Rainbow!!!! Once again...i double dog dare you!

Hey...I'm already getting excited about tomorrow...it's friday you know!