So, who am I to write, and why should I do it? First of all let me start by saying it out loud to myself and everyone – what a dumb question! I am a human with experiences, observations, feelings and reflections of my almost 4 decades of life. But also: I am a human with doubts, biases, wrongful beliefs, and, apparently, a writer’s block. Having said that, both of the lists above provide me with so much to say and so many topics to discuss. Except for that last piece that demands some deep de-clogging. And cleansing I shall do in this very first entry. 

Root

At the root of it all, of course, is the fear of being seen and known. Having survived most of my life by making myself small and trying to not stand out, I am scared to death to expand and be truly seen. The feeling oscillates between being too much and not being enough. Despite these habitual terrifying thoughts, I have been a writer since I started my first diary in the 5th grade, composing rather purposefully funny nonfiction about how my days went and what I thought about things. Wisened by the past decades, my inner older child wants to write for a much wider audience than me, myself and I. 

Here I am letting go of the fear to be known.

Sacral

That’s the shoulda-woulda-coulda part. That’s the intuition I did not listen to for so long. That’s the self-direction and self-expression nudges that my traumatized mind deemed untrustworthy and unreliable. From saying “yes” when it should’ve been a “no”, to stepping into my marriage and hurting through my doctorate studies, to choosing safer smaller ways when I wanted to go big.

Here I am forgiving myself for the lack of self-trust and faith, for putting myself in the hands of other people and circumstances, and I will quiet my mind to hear and write.

Solar Plexus

Sharing ideas and observations about people and workings of the world to help and inspire people has been my known purpose for a while now. Over a year ago, with cold sweat on my shaking palms and in a giggly nervous voice, I said it out loud to a friend of mine for the first time: I want to speak in front of and move people at the deepest levels to live their best lives. My whole body was overcome and my stomach was churning with a spectrum of emotions: from shame of wanting something outside of what was prepared for me by the not-always-well-meaning society to the relief of finally putting my desire into words. All that came directly from the place where we find our purpose, our truth. 

Here I am saying I want to serve and inspire people, and I let go of the shame.

Heart

I often think about the lives that my female lineage had, and a deeply penetrating grief takes over every cell of my body. My great grandmother passed at just forty years old, having put two of her four daughters she was raising by herself after WWII through a two-year college. My grandmother became an elementary school teacher, dedicating almost 40 years of her life to educating children in her small village in Siberia. My mother grew up with a great aunt, barely seeing her mother. My grandma survived physical abuse from my mom’s dad, and after he took his life, she gave her 4-year-old girl to her aunt to raise. When my mom was pregnant with me as her second child, she would tell anyone who’d listen that it would be a girl and that she loved me so much. I grew up with my mom after my parents divorced, and she has struggled with severe mental illness ever since I remember myself. It is preventing me from even being able to give her the love I feel.

Here I am feeling the grief and accepting I will live with it probably my whole life. Nonetheless, I choose to feel the love, and show it, and write it down, and give it to people that can receive it. 

Throat

Lying to oneself can be a survival or coping mechanism. Learned in childhood, when creating a safer world in your own head was the only way to get through what was happening around, it persists into adulthood. Things that I thought I wanted, personality traits that I thought were mine, values that I thought I had, churches that I thought I needed, people that I thought had loved me. The truth is that I thought a lot, and felt so little. Truth is felt and should be spoken.

Here I am committing to peeling off the lies I integrated into myself, and to speaking my truth.

Third Eye

The first time I had a glimmer, it was when having my morning coffee on the balcony. I believe it was spring or maybe early summer in Tucson: birds were chirping somewhere on palm trees and a blooming magnolia in front of the building; there was a light breeze, and the sun was bright in the Sonoran desert kind of way. In the shade of the balcony, I got the feeling of enormous gratitude about being alive, tasting my aromatic cold-brew and being able to read calmly at the beginning of my work day. And then there was a palpable connection I felt in my whole being: to everything and everyone. I was a small insignificant piece of a huge and loving whole, yet I was able to contain and sense all that love and energy within. 

Here I claim that separation of life vs death, nature vs society, humans vs animals, people vs other people, men vs women, the body vs the mind, emotions vs rational thoughts, is complete and utter bullshit. We all are one, wonderfully unique and intricately united.

Crown

Stories I tell myself about how things should be, become and run, and come to be, have started to feel limiting. It is like trying to get out of a swamp, and the more I move, the less I can actually do about being stuck. I have lived and seen enough of myself, other people and life to say that there is no point in forcing the path to the vision. 

Here I promise to myself and you that I will surrender my path to the flow and just document the unfolding scenery and tell the stories on the way.

Yours truly,

Olga