L.E.
"I am not free today because the system worked. I am free because I plead guilty to journalism. [...] When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream: to educate people about how the world works so that through understanding, we might bring about something better. Carrying a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go."
Julian Assange
https://www.youtube.com/live/idphGmY3QRM?si=ThSsbVR4SwMSxtyu
It's a dangerous game, speaking the truth. Being honest. Looking into someone's soul and saying I see you. It's dangerous because we live in a world that invites us all too often to withhold our truth. Even when people have been kind enough to share.
I'm someone for whom withholding comes easy. I'm scared of hurt and vulnerability, so I sometimes recognize in myself the tendency to ball up when someone says 'open'. But I'm keeping an eye on that.
I'm reminding myself that I can't just take someone's truth without sharing some of my own. That's not how this works. It's like one partner dancing all these elaborate moves, while the other stands completely still. Come to think of it, that might be an exciting concept.
But not in life.
Not in mine.
So I've been doing this a fair bit. Reminding myself when someone has been honest and I'm getting comfortable and feeling all warm in their openness that I should resist the compulsion to close up now. When they say 'well what about you then'.
Well... what about me? I don't share indiscriminately, I don't think. I measure what I say to an extent, but I've been playing this game of saying what I'm not supposed to for a while now. The things that we politely and superficially withhold. It's a strange little play that leaves you empty and a little sad.
So I stop playing it.
Someone asked me to open yesterday. Three someones, actually. And I felt in me the familiar tendency to say no, to skirt around the truth and bubble forth words that reveal nothing. I'm good at that. By trade and repetition. But I spotted the words of deflection, all my usual suspects, and stripped them from my tongue.
One body asked me to speak the name of things that hurt a great deal. I could hide myself in my pain or offer words that could carry to someone who needed them. I offered words. I stood before a communal truth, before women's eyes, and bared my pain. I set the tone for the day to wear truth and openness.
I thought I was all spent, but then others came and knocked on my window. Who are you? Did you know this? Did you feel that? Who are you when you stop pretending we don't know each other? That we don't see more than we let on?
I told them each who I was and it was terrifying. Honesty remains terrifying. But just because something is scary doesn't mean it's wrong, does it? I'm learning that, too.
I'm hooked on this addictive thing. This truth-telling thing. And I'm worried that soon, I won't be able to pace myself back to polite, comforting lies again. Not to anyone, not even when I might need them or benefit from them.
Increasingly, I find myself in situations where I stand before souls (some I've known a decade, some barely met along this journey) and say this is who I am, this is what I feel. And it's so beautiful it makes me cry. It's so free.
I am so free.
Music.
Because music is freedom, also. And because 
My brother turned me on to Lady Gaga's new album, designed as a companion to the much-awaited Joker: Folie a Deux. This lady's got fantastic pipes on her, and I'm really glad to see her doing more of this jazzy sort of stuff that lets her shine. I never liked the autotuned, pop crap she started out with.
Past the museum of death
And the mad man yelling answers
I sail on new beginnings
And psychics taking chances
And when you hear this song
If you ain't dead sing along
Bang and strum to these here drums
Till you get where you belong
This song has been stuck in my head for a week now, so I come back to it at least once a day. This band is very dear to me and only became dearest after I had the good luck to see them in concert earlier this year.
Call up a truce
Cause I'm about to bust loose
Protect ya neck 'cause son
I'm breaking out of my noose
Also. Happy October. Proper fucking fall. Halloween season officially open. Also. It's International Coffee Day, and we're running a contest around that over in Cinnamon Cup Coffee. Grab a coffee. For yourself. For another. Or be truthful. Maybe I convinced you above :D
Read the rules in the official announcement and maybe join us? It's coffee and HIVE to win, what more do you want?