Someone linked to my blog and billed it as "Zen of A Cheerleader"... thanks, TechieIdiot. That'll be the title of my next book. Complete with pictures.

The whole cheerleader thing is an interesting look at Who I Am. Yes, in general I'm a happy, cheerful, and dramatic person. And sure, flexible legs. But that's not why I became a cheerleader. I didn't have a great desire to lead a crowd of people in spelling out "Defense" or "Winton Woods Warriors" -- Give me a W! Another one! And another one! I didn't even like sports.

Sidenote: anyone ever seen "But I'm a Cheerleader"? Great movie, I highly recommend it. Clea Duval as a bitchy dyke and Ru Paul as a man. After watching it for the first time, I finally couldn't deny my desire for women. And I was watching it with my boyfriend.

I became a cheerleader because I thought that's what I was supposed to do. I thought that was what I was supposed to want. All through jr high and high school, my goal was to do it "right", an ideal created from all the books I read (Sweet Valley High, VC Andrews, RL Stine, and hundreds more) and the television shows I watched (Growing Pains, Saved by the Bell, Full House, My So-Called Life -- I realize these betray my age), and the movies and magazines blah blah blah. All that brainwash really got into my cerebral cortex and I believed that that's what I needed to be in order to be... valid. Yes, in order to be a worthy human being, I needed to be that perfect teenager. Not perfect like a goody-two-shoes teacher's pet, but perfect in the sense of being RIGHT. Not totally popular, because in the books the popular crowd was always snobby. Liked by the "popular people", but not in their crowd. But not a nerd, definitely not a nerd. Effortlessly smart, not obsessed with grades but still in the honors classes. Complains about her parents. Always has a boyfriend. Activities and clubs every day after school. The one who listens to her friends' problems with compassion, and never has any problems herself. And a Cheerleader.

So I sought out cheerleading not for the cheering itself, but for the image. And then I became the perfect cheerleader. I perfected my splits and herky jumps, the spirit sprinkles and the frozen smile (vaseline on the teeth so your lips don't stick to them). The way I walked so the pleated skirt swished. The way my ponytail (long hair, meticulously curled before each game) swung as I hopped on my toes. It was all choreographed to perfection.

If someone tells me what to do, I can do it. And I can do it damn well. It's one of my talents, following instructions. Smile big, be happy, jump here. It's why I'm a great actress. It's why I love acting. It's all following directions. From the director. And of course there's so much more to it, to really make it an art. But having the lines I need to say all scripted out is one of the key attractions for me. Because the right answer is right there. All I have to do is DO it, and then I'm "right". Which was the obvious goal to the 14 year old TickledSpirit. And the 11 year old, and the 18 year old, and it wasn't until about 20 that I started asking the questions of "Why?" Why is that the right answer? Why am I supposed to want this? Why do women wear makeup and shave their legs?

and now I'm an anarchist. Because it wasn't fulfilling to me to live as if life were a coloring book, simply filling the space within a defined picture, or blindly connecting-the-dots. Anarchy for me is living creatively, as an act of continuous creation. Instead of a coloring book, it's painting on a blank canvas with acrylic, watercolor, fingerpaint, motor oil, peanut butter, blood, shaving cream, mango juice, shit... And it's vital to me, because I'm so drawn towards the other extreme, to be intentional that the choices I make are coming from me and not an instruction manual. Before, my existence was made valid by being right. Now my only validation is in being raw.

One of our cows died this weekend. Santana the Jersey (who I actually wrote about in a recent post). She was a favorite around here for her sweet demeanor and the radical shift she made over the course of her life from kicky aggression to said sweet demeanor. I can only hope to be remembered for such a shift in the course of my life (though I'm not really one for kicky aggression... more of a control freak on par in intensity with the kicky aggression Santana was known for).

At a recent dairy meeting we had been discussing the size of our herd, looking at the approaching need for reducing the number of cows we're feeding and caring for. Which means we kill them for meat -- we being the royal We, not I the adamant vegetarian. Woody is our resident cow slaughterer; he homesteaded in British Columbia for 25 years, hunting moose for meat and making snowshoes from their hides. He wears a hat made from a beaver that he trapped and skinned, then formed into fantastically warm headwear. Living with Woody reminds me how unnecessarily complex we make our lives, and how basic and raw it really can be. RAW -- what a word. Undefined chaos, unmediated, IMmediate... what I'm compelled to seek when I'm driven by my most basic core.

Santana was high on the list of cows to kill. My first reaction to hearing that she died was one of relief, that she chose death herself instead of us choosing it for her. Standing over her grave the next day, I felt a profound understanding of the nature of Life. Picturing her body under the ground, I felt a deep Knowing that her life as an individual had melted into Life, some exquisite Oneness of which I've sought understanding through countless books, dogmas, and drugs... only to be found (fleetingly, of course) over the grave of a dead Jersey cow.

Back to jealousy for a brief bit, just to wrap things up after the quiz. So here's my reiteration: "jealousy" is the word used to describe feeling unhappy/bad/sad/mad/upset/frustrated/anrgy about someone spending time with someone else. Those feelings are certainly real, and I'll agree that the word "jealous" applies to how I was feeling in the story. And I'm not satisfied to stop there. It's important to me to look at WHY I'm upset. Where does my sadness stem from? What am I making it mean that he spent the night with someone else? (update for new readers: this isn't a problem in itself; we have an open relationship... see story below) I want to understand my feelings more clearly before I throw them on someone else so that it doesn't become a blaming/defensiveness cycle, which tears relationships apart.

so that's why I don't use the word jealousy. It's not descriptive of what's really going on for me.

in other news, I realized tonight that the look on peoples' faces when I tell them I was a Religion major in college is the same look as when I tell them I was a cheerleader in high school. Varsity. Captain. I have pictures to prove it.

speaking of high school, singing in a cover band now makes me feel totally inadequate about my knowledge of music from the 80s and 90s. I don't know most of the songs that we're singing (besides "It's Raining Men" and En Vogue's "Never Gonna Get It"), songs that the other band members already know by heart because they've sung them at the top of their lungs in the privacy of their own rooms in expressions of teenage angst. Me, I'm musically ignorant, except for Broadway musicals and what was played on popular radio. U2 and Madonna. I did Country music for awhile in junior high, but I've been over that for quite a while (though I still recognize songs on country stations when I'm flipping though the radio -- scary). We aren't singing any country songs in our All Request Dance Band. We're getting ready to play for Validation Day, which is the hippie commune version of Feb 14th. Instead of giving special attentionto one person, we do a whole collective appreciation thing. Each person has a multi-paged homemade card made for them by anothe person, and then in the weeks leading up to V-day, people write short appreciations in each person's card. On Feb 14th we have a huge party and read the cards out lound and try to guess who the recipient it. Then we have a wild dance party where everyone is feeling good and loved from reading 70 messages of "you're wonderful because..." and "i'm so glad you're in my life". So our band is playing at the dance. All I can say is that Summer does a scrumptious Aretha Franklin.

the frozen ground sparkles like a prom dress
in the LED glow of my headlamp
as I walk to the composting toilet behind the woodshed

stars obscured by clouds
I am my only light

I'm hoping to dive into a lot of ideas and possibilities on this blog, and I really value the additional perspective that people's comments bring. Part of my emotional charge around all this is that I've come to these ideas by intentionally releasing the teachings of the dominant culture, choosing instead to base my ideas about life on what I experience. My experience has been that many of the assumptions of mainstream culture are destructive, both personally and socially. I'm not satisfied with that. So I chose (and choose every day) to try something different. The challenges I'm hearing from a lot of the comments are the same messages from that dominant culture that I've been putting a lot of energy into letting go of. And that doesn't make them unworthy of consideration on my part -- not at all. I just have a lot of emotional charge around it, hence the defensiveness.

so, dearest readers, a pop quiz for you. Short-answer, worth %27 of your grade, to be turned in by the end of class.

Define Jealousy.

I deeply, sincerely apologize to all my faithful blogophiles who have been writing inspiring comments and then checking back day after day to hear the rest of the story. How did it all pan out? Is the tall, lanky, big-nosed guy really a jerk? Has TickledSpirit run away from the commune in despair?

No, no, I'm still here. I realized as I was out in the field with the cows today that I'm at a distinct disadvantage to many of my readers and fellow bloggers: I don't sit at a computer for most of the day. In fact, I have to make an intentional effort to actually get in front of a computer screen. We have about 15 computers here that are all for public use. Usually there's at least one free, and sometimes none of them are, except for the one with the shift key that's been sabotaged by honey or something equally as sticky.

I was realizing this disadvantage today as I was having brilliant thoughts in the middle of the cow pasture. I thought "I could write this in my blog! After I finish shoveling this shit." And then it's dinner time, and then I have a meeting, then a date, then ... whatever. Excuses, excuses.

And I have to admit that I've been hesitant to write because I wanted to write a brilliant post on jealousy, and every time I sat down to the computer i didn't feel very brilliant. Again, whatever. I'll just try my best -- bear with me.

JEALOUSY.

It's an umbrella word for much more complex emotions. And I don't use it because it isn't specific, and in not being specific, it isn't useful except to placate the rational mind. It's a socially-acceptable feeling without any responsibility tied to it. "I'm jealous because you're doing that". The only possibility for forward motion then is for you to stop doing that. What an easy dodge of responsibility!

I can look further into the sadness/pain/anger that's traditionally labeled as jealousy and find out what's going on for me. Usually, I'm acting out of a place of fear. When I was monogamous, it was often the fear that I was going to be left for someone else, which stems from my fear that I'm not good enough, my fear of not being "right" (i.e. perfect). This is my shit, and really has nothing to do with what my partner is doing. With open relationships, the fear of being left for someone else is null and void. If a relationship ends, it's based on the merits (or lack thereof) of the relationship itself. So I don't need to get into that mindspin. There are plenty more mindspins I can leap into.

so this time, when Lanky Magician wasn't there in the morning, I was sad and confused. I had an expectation that he'd show up, and he didn't. That's sad. AND I never asked him to come, I never told him I wanted him to come. It just made sense to me that he would (he nearly always comes to sleep with me after his late-night tree climbing, and I had told him I was having a hard time earlier that day). The fears came up for me around something making total sense to me, seeming practically "inevitable", and then it not happening. Why? I was totally confused. So I came up with lots of explanations: he doesn't care about me like I thought he did (sucks), he fell out of the tree and is broken somewhere (sucks), he made a brilliant decision to spend time with one of his other lovers, who've been asking for more time from him -- this one made the most sense to me.

then when I asked him about it, and he evaded the question, I knew he hadn't been with one of his other partners, because he would have told me. The "I'll tell you later" implied that there was a longer story, one that he didn't really want to tell me. And then my volcano erupted, because the explanation that I had figured out to make sense of something I didn't understand, suddenly evaporated. And not understanding, not "getting it", is one of my deepest fears.

a story:

she emerged from the dream, rising slowly like a diver returning to the surface (not too fast or the nitrogen contaminates your blood), vague traces of a sad dreamsong still playing in her mind. Consciousness waking, eyes opening, she was immediately aware a distinct singularity under the weight of her flannel comforter. She was alone. And she hadn't expected to wake up alone. She had expected to wake up at 4:30, maybe 5, to the sound of the door opening, to the soft slide of skin meeting hers, to his hair tickling her cheek.

there's trust involved in falling asleep, trust that the world won't change too dramatically while you're unconcious and unable to change with it.

"Why didn't he come to me?" The warmth of the blankets cocooned her confusion and sadness. She thought of the possibilities: a)he's with the Dutch goddess, b)he's with the lover from the West Coast who's visiting for a week, c)he fell out of the tree he was climbing at 2am and broke his head open. Unable to do anything productive with "c", she wrestled with possibilities "a" and "b" for awhile, swinging from "they need time together" to "they had time together last night" to "she's only here for a week" to "I told him I was having a hard day!"... the trapeze act known as polyamory. She finally landed on the platform of "If he decided to sleep with "a" or "b" last night, they probably needed it. They've been having a hard time. Our relationship is fantastic, and we'll find more time together after West Coast Lover leaves." She took a bow for the audience, staightened out her sequined costume, and climbed down the ladder, exhausted and satisfied.

She launched herself into a morning of trying to lead a roomful of kids in games they were too cool to play, then attempted to re-arrange the tofu schedule to accommodate people who hadn't remembered something very important that they had to do, so they couldn't make tofu on the day they were assigned. "Sorry, I forgot I'm going to Texas next week." "Sorry, I forgot I have to clip my toenails then" An hour later, she sat in the dining room (schedules still unfinished), tears brimming, then falling, then wiped away, them brimming again, as the lunch crowd swirled around her.

he walked in the door holding his 2 year old son, wearing the outrageous knitted hat she loved. She was relieved to see him, and the tears started flowing even as she smiled at the toddler in his arms. "How are you?", he asked absently.

"I hate tofu! People suck."

then a friend came into the room, vented about her struggles, and he was gone, out the door, off to help her fix it. "He'll be back," she affirmed, and continued shuffling schedules for the sake of soy. He returned, engaging in brief conversations with the people around her while she struggled with the tofu schedule. The tears returned. She collected the finished schedules and fled.

She set her alarm for an hour later, then climbed into bed, tears soaking her pillow for the second time that day, her mind occupied by schizophrenic banter.

"didn't he see I was fucking upset?"
"maybe there's other shit going on for him"
"why isn't he coming to find me?"
"you fled, woman. You didn't ask for his help"
"if he really loved me..."
"don't even go there"

eventually she gave up the struggle, her inner dialogue melting into a wordless sadness. The alarm ended the hour with classical music from NPR, and she laid in bed trying to convince herself that the dairy barn needed to be cleaned. Really.

four hours in the dairy barn alone is highly theraputic. Spraying cow shit off of concrete and washing giant metal milk cans helps put life in perspective. And then there's the cows -- hulking animals with kicking hooves. When they're being milked, the distance from hoof to face-of-milker is less than a foot. Milking the cows that afternoon, our heroine blocked a right hook from Santana the Jersey with one hand, and she felt a lot better after that.

walking from the dairy barn in the fading light of evening, she congratulated herself on her lightened mood. "It's not a big deal," she thought. "Nothing is. I have a great life." She climbed the stairs to her residence, wondering where to find her lanky lover in the half hour before dinner. She flicked on the light as she entered her room, and was astonished to see him stretched out under the covers. "I hope the pillow isn't still wet", she thought, and then took off her cow shit-covered pants and slipped into bed next to him.

"I'm so glad you're here" she whispered, as they wrapped themselves around each other and drifted into light slumber.

they wake, make love passionately, then walk up to the dining hall together, smiling, happy, and post-orgasmic.

"How was tree climbing last night?"
"Fantastic! We climbed into the ironwoods over the river and decided that the number of people in trees over a river at that moment could probably be counted on two hands."
"So who was the lucky one last night that got to have you in their bed?" (said lightly, still smiling)

he opened the door to the dining hall.

"ahhh.... I'll tell you later"
"Ohhh... I'm intensely curious" (still smiling)

they walked up to the steamtable and get their food. Not much left as they were 45 minutes late.

"I'll see you later" and he turned to walk away.
"Hey, I REALLY want to know" (still smiling, slightly confused)
"I'll tell you later" (walking backwards away from her)

her face posed the question "what's going on?"

"Later", and he walked away

the sound of her plate shattering on the floor silenced the dining hall. She towered above the broken ceramic and scattered quiche, her Leo fire burning.

"What the fuck is going on?" she demanded, her voice clear and loud, the result of years of training as an actress. "Don't be evasive with me. Who the fuck do you think you are? Fuck you." She turned around quickly and walked out the door to the applause of the other diners.

ALTERNATE (ACTUAL) ENDING:
"I'll tell you later" (walking backwards away from her)

her face posed the question "what's going on?"

"Later", and he walked away

she turned slowly, overwhelmingly confused. Her tears bypassed "brimming" and took a shortcut to "flowing steadily." She walked over to the silverware counter, attempting to remain composed, grabbed a fork, and ran for the back door.

she paced rapidly in the dark on the concrete loading dock, oblivious to the stench of the compost bin. She quickly wiped her eyes when she heard someone approaching from the Tofu Hut. It was her close friend and sometimes lover, a twenty-something woman from California with a great taste in music and a mysterious smile.

steadying her voice as much as possible, she called out to her. "Hey lady."

"Hey. What are you doing out here in the cold? Are you okay? Ahh... no, you're not." (ahh, the perception of a woman!)

she cried, she listened. They embraced outside, snow beginning to fall through the dark sky. They walked down the hill together to another friend and a bottle of red wine.

(not)THE END

I'm having a temper tantrum in my mind. This, the growth from yesterday's funk.

I've been reading other people's blogs and getting really angry at how good they are. So well written, so full of beautiful images and details and ideas and ponderings. And me, I write about how to make tofu. And I think, "I used to write like that! Or at least in the same spectrum of quality and interest-value! Where has all that gone???"

I awoke from a dream this morning that ended with all the characters from the dream singing to me as I moved away from my home, a tiny apartment in some obscure city. The song was a mournful melody in a minor key, the words: "where have you gone? Where are you now?"

and on top of that, I woke up alone. I had really been hoping that a certain long-haired, big-nosed, lanky magician would crawl into bed with me at 4:30am after his monthly full-moon tree climb, but I woke up at 6 to a lonely bed and a sad song in my head.

I added links to two blogs I've grown to love (and hate at the same time, oh judgemental me, because they're so fucking good). slow exhale and mictlan -- they're brilliant.

All right, tofu production it is. But first, a reflection on cooking dinner.

Dinners at Twin Oaks are a big deal. People have been working all day and when they get to the steamtable at 6:00, they want GOOD food. I rarely do a dinner shift, but this week i got scheduled for one. I realized this morning how nervous about it I was. People are really picky about their food being good, and I want everyone to like me. If the food I cook sucks, people won't like me. So it's a big neurotic deal to me to be given a dinner shift.

But I was scheduled to cook with two amazing women, Mele and Julia. Mele is a fantastic cook and very "chill" in the kitchen, so working with her helped me relax about my neurosis. I've worked with other cooks here who spend the entire five hours on a nervous edge, rushing and worrying and fretting and planning elaborate meals that could never be finished in 5 hours. I told Mele how much I noticed the difference, and she said "I don't like to feel that way, so I don't plan meals where I have to rush." Smart woman.

side note about gender: having an all woman cooking team tonight was great, but that's not really standard. Thinking about all the people who cook on a regular basis, it seems about half and half, maybe even slightly more men. Getting away from sexism and gender bias is an intentional part of our culture here, and we have no overtly gender-segregated jobs. We aren't perfect, and some of the more physical jobs (tofu work, especially) are done mainly by men... but the main thing is that we're trying to make all work at least AVAILABLE and ACCESSIBLE to everyone. And a key piece of this is that anyone can be trained on any job they're interested in; it's not based on whatever background or training I already have.

anyway, back to tofu. The job that I do is actually one of the most gender-segregated on the farm! I'm the only female doing this piece of production, and I have to say that that's one of the reasons I don't quit doing tofu -- I don't want to leave the kettle team with only men.

I'll begin with the basics. Tofu starts out as soybeans. We get organic soybeans from another farm (we can't grow them ourselves because we don't have enough farmland) and soak them overnight. Then we grind them up into boiling water in a huge kettle (one of the most physically demanding parts of the job is lifting buckets of soybeans up over your head to pour them into the grinder, while standing on a precarious platform over a steaming kettle). The ground up beans in the water is affectionately called "slurry." When it boils, we pump the slurry through a centrifuge that catches all the solid bits, and what comes out from the centrifuge is soymilk. HOT and steamy. The solid bean bits that are filtered out are called okara (oh-CAR-ah), and it can be used to make other food stuff, but we mainly use it to bulk up our compost (and some of it goes into our vegetarian sausage, which is delicious, and brilliantly called "soysage").

We save some soymilk for drinking (add nutmeg, ginger and vanilla and it's perfect), and then curd the rest with "nigari," a seawater extract. This is my favorite part of the job: taking a barrell full of soymilk and using a long paddle to stir it into a tornado (where it's spinning so fast there's a hole in the middle of the barrell), and then pouring the nigari in from as high as possible (I reach my arm over my head and stand on my tiptoes) so it goes straight down into the center of the tornado. I get excited every time. It's thrilling.

then the nigari does it's work, separating the tofu into curds and whey. We scoop out the whey (still crazy HOT) into a big barrell, which we use to pour over the next beans that are going into the grinder, to soften them up even more. The curds go in trays where even more whey is pressed out of them, and they're squished together into large blocks which are cut into one-pound squares and then vaccum packed and pasturized. And all of this is happening at once in our tiny tofu hut, from 6am until 10pm every production day. We usually do two production days a week, making thousands of pounds each day.

my OTHER favorite part of the job is using the power washer to clean out the filter on the centrifuge. I stand with my feet spread apart and hold the long-handled nozzle and spray out a crazy-pressurized stream of water. If I'm not careful, okara bits shoot back out at me, covering my face and arms with soy. I love it.

Twin Oaks Community Foods

after a wild holiday season full of projects and parties, I really noticed myself in a funk today. My diagnosis is that it's because I'm suddenly not specifically focused on making something happen. My past month has involved doing the Co-Empowerment workshop and then the New Years Party (always wild), and then immediately facilitating a weekend gathering of festival organizers to talk about the revolutionary power of festivals (more on this later). I was totally focused on these projects and didn't really pay attention to anything else. Now I'm back to my "daily routine" (though I don't have much of a routine!), and I'm finding it hard to figure out what to do with myself. So even though I had a full day of work scheduled (two hours of childcare in the morning and then cooking dinner all afternoon), I still felt unfocused and scattered. I need another project... Willy Wonka and the Tofu Factory! We're choosing the cast next week. No auditions in this egalitarian commune! We sit around a table and talk about what parts we want, and then come to a brilliant compromise that makes everyone happy. Last year we had 4 people who wanted the two leads, so we switched the actors after Act I, and the second set finished out the show.

next time: how going to festivals can make you a revolutionary...

Got up at 7:25 for a 7:30am tofu shift. Reason #324 I love living here: a 2 minute walk past the garden is my commute.

I dread making tofu whenever I'm assigned to work there. Which is ironic, because I'm the one who assigns tofu shifts! After awhile of not being a tofu worker, I discovered it made my life easier if I could just plug myself in on open shifts instead of running around finding other people to do it. So I got trained to run the tofu kettle. It's hot and loud and the shifts are 4 hours long. It's not work that I have any vested interest in, except that it makes money for the community. I mean, I like eating tofu, and eating FRESH, just-pressed tofu scraps (sliced off the end of blocks that are over one pound) is a definite perk of the job. That doesn't compel me for 4 hours, though. Most of my other work here are things that I really enjoy doing (milking the cows, being with children, doing outreach for the communities movement...), so I'm actually excited (usually) when I'm heading off to do the work. With tofu I have to convince myself that it's important to the community, remind myself of how much I like to eat tofu, and then drag myself out of bed.

The really interesting part of this is that once I'm actually in the Tofu Hut working, I usually have a fine time. Not great, but it isn't hellish. We play loud music and I work with my friends and we talk and laugh. This morning I worked with Paxus and we grabbed kisses from each other whenever there was a slow moment or I had to walk past him.

more later. Maybe I'll actually describe the tofu-making process... Interested? Vote with your comments.

"I need you to tell me you're dying"

My first thought was that I didn't know if I could carry her through it. But instead of sliding into my self doubt spin, I pushed forward and started the role play. Her major fear was being abandoned by people she cared about, and we had originally begun the role play by me telling her I was moving to California. But she stopped in the middle and said it wasn't working for her, because she just thought she'd go there with me. She said I needed to really abandon her. She said I needed to tell her I was dying.

I've been in Workshop Wonderland for the past 2 weeks. It's amazing to me how transformative one weekend can be. The weekend before New Years, we (me, Pax, and two other amazing women) conducted a workshop called Co-Empowerment, an intense swan dive into personal passions and the fears that hold us back from doing what we want to do. We spend a big chunk of time exploring what those core passions and fears are, then each participant envisions what co (gender neutral pronoun used instead of he or she) would be like beyond co's fears. We ask, who would you be if this Fear didn't drive your choices? How would you live your life differently? Each person then does a self-designed role play of a situation that stimulates that specific fear, and they act it out from the perspective of their "empowered persona." It's intense and actually dramatically life-changing for some of the people who do it.

This woman's distress was that she didn't allow herself to really connect with people because she was afraid of what would happen if the connection disappeared. It was excruciatingly hard for her to open herself to other people; when she did, she felt weak.

"I need to tell you something, and it's really hard for me to do this because I care about you so much. I... I've been going to the doctor for the past few weeks, and... I'm sick. I'm really sick. I have cancer. It's too far along to operate. And I'm dying."

I had tears in my eyes as I said the last sentence. She started to speak a few times, then just stared at me. She reached forward and wrapped her arms around me, and started sobbing. I held her, crying too. When she pulled back she said, "let's stop", and then sat quietly for about a minute. "How are you?" I asked.

"That was really intense."

"How do you feel?"

"Different. I didn't run out of the room. That's what I wanted to do. But I stayed."

"Why?"

"Because that's what it looks like beyond my fears. That's what my empowered persona would have done. Accepted the feelings. I felt them bubbling up and I wanted to push them down, but instead my empowered persona just keeps going."

"That's your message to yourself," I said. "Keep Going"

and she said the weekend changed her life