qos | From the Files (Reply)

I was sifting through some not-in-file-folders miscellany a few minutes ago and found this magazine image. Something about it caught and held my attention, and I studied it for a long time, sifting through and analyzing my feelings. Finally a realization hit home harder than it ever has before.

I didn't tear this page from the magazine because I could imagine myself looking or dressing like this woman someday, or embodying the less obvious qualities she and her star pendant expressed to me. I tore it out because I thought she looked like my heroine alter ego.

I never had any expectation that I would -- or could -- be any part of the life my alter ego lived. I didn't even try, because the context of that fantasy was so far removed from real life there was no point.

And so I grew up without the slightest genuine investment in my own future. I looked out for my immediate needs: getting the expected education, holding jobs that would keep me in food and shelter and books, and never thought about what the consequences of those choices (and non-choices) would be in the years ahead.

I never tore pictures from magazines because they looked like how *I* wanted to look, or to give me ideas about what *I* could do or be in this life. It was always about her, the other me who had the life I wanted -- but which was so safely removed from reality I never had to risk anything to try to achieve it.

Maybe that's too hard on myself. Maybe I truly did not see any options before me that ignited my passions, and so I imagined a passionate life in a place where those options did exist. The end result is the same: my current life, which is only just beginning to become something that I can be proud of, someplace where my true self is beginning to be expressed outwardly instead of hidden in code in secret notebooks.

I realized recently that one of the things I need to surrender is my heroine alter ego. I don't think about her much anymore, but she is the product of my fundamental belief that I could not do or be who I truly wanted to be in this lifetime. She has to go, to make room for the authentic self which I am finally daring to express.