Thin Skinned

                                                                                                                   Found this while wandering the internet today:

“I wear my skin as thin as I have to, armor myself only as much as seems absolutely necessary. I try to live naked in the world, unashamed even under attack, unafraid even though I know how much there is to fear ….Trying always to know what I am doing and why, choosing to be known as who I am … is as tricky as it ever was. I tell myself that life is the long struggle to understand and love fully. That to keep faith with those who have literally saved my life and made it possible for me to imagine more than survival, I have to try constantly to understand more, love more fully, go more naked in order to make others as safe as I myself want to be. I want to live past my own death … in what I have made possible for others – my sisters, my son, my lover, my community – the people I believe in absolutely, men and women whom death does not stop, who honor the truth of each other’s stories.” — Dorothy Allison

Wow.  I’m not even sure how to respond to this, because it is so beautiful.  It’s my heart cry, but so often I find myself doing the exact opposite — putting on an invisible armor that is so thick I begin to lose visual contact even with myself.

I found this on a site that title it, “borrowed mission statement.”  I, too, am following suite.  I want to be “naked”, like Ms. Allen, and live a life that is a reflection not of creating an image of myself, but living fully, loving totally — even in the face of opposition.  I want to be so true that I never again wonder what I really “look” like.

Wow.

~ by lostgirlfound on November 9, 2007.