Outing Myself For A Moment In Someone Else's Heart

At my bridge group on Monday one of my friends said, “You outed yourself in your last blog.”

“I did,” I agreed. She was right. I wrote honestly about my own vulnerability, my own post-bridge-game-self-created-drama and what I did with it.

One of the things I learned while writing for the Fairfield Citizen News all those years was that as a first person columnist, I needed to be transparent—a word so frequently used in politics it makes me squirm to write it.

What does that mean? To me, as a writer of essays about life, it means telling the truth about myself. Not pretending to know it all and certainly not maintaining a safe, intellectual distance from my own experience as I write about it. Who wants that?

My hope is that I can write about what happens in my life and the lives of others around me with enough clarity and personal investment that readers might, just might, be able to see something of themselves in the story I am telling. Not every reader, every time. That would be too much to expect. But some readers most of the time? That would be great!

As a child, in church, this sentence,“Be ye therefore perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect,” (Matt: 5: 48), used to fill me with despair. Who could be perfect? I wondered. Perfect like Jesus? I could never attain that perfection. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but I was sure that perfection was totally beyond my reach. I surmised that I was expected to try to be perfect, while all the time knowing it was out of the question.

And then, when I was forty-five and a student at New York Theological Seminary, my bible study teacher challenged that sentence from the Gospel of Matthew. She told us that the Greek word from which the word “perfect” was translated, actually meant “complete.” Be ye therefore complete? That means, the teacher explained, getting to know yourself, becoming aware: accepting yourself, warts and all. Becoming transparent to yourself and to God.

What liberation! Complete was something I could work toward.

No longer strung up on the perfection cross, I was free to discover who I was, the deepest and sometimes scariest or weirdest parts of myself and bring them, as Carl Jung would encourage, out of the darkness into the light of conscious recognition. It is only through self awareness, Jung argues--and I share his view--that good choices are possible.

I choose to be transparent, “outing” myself whenever it helps me to share a story that might, just might, find a momentary home in someone else’s heart.

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Right now a few people in these countries are reading this blog. I am so grateful to those in: England, Romania, France, Canada, Portugal, Belarus, Netherlands, and Ukraine and, of course, the USA. Thank you all!