Pushing against a door labelled "pull"

A friend said recently that I'd changed in the time she'd known me. I wanted to deny this, and say it was simply her perception of me that had changed, or that I had only stopped hiding so much of myself. She was correct, though. I have changed, or at least become more fully myself.

Dancing connects with my emotional side, somehow. I don't know whether it's the music, the movement or being so close to another person, but the sensitivity I've spent most of my life trying to hide is no longer hidden. To be honest, I don't know if I was ever really that successful at hiding it. My way of dealing with that part of my character was simply staying away from other people as much as possible, so I wasn't vulnerable.

When someone I work with heard that I was learning to dance, she laughed at first. A lot of people laugh at first. After a few minutes, however, she said she thought it was wonderful that I was connecting with my inner passion. Hmm.

Suffering as much loss, dealing with as much change, and having to cope with the amount of uncertainty I've encountered over the past few years has meant that I've had to change. Even now, I think that I still need to find other ways to cope. As a part of my training, I had to go for personal counselling, and it brought things into focus I would rather have continued to push to the back of my mind, so to speak. It took a long time for the counsellor to understand me, so maybe we didn't cover things as fully as we could.

I'm starting to think I should go for more counselling. There are so many things that are unresolved. If you know anything about the process, you know that we work most on our issues in the time between sessions, and also in the time after the sessions have come to an end. There are things I know I have to talk about, and yet a large part of my reluctance to return to counselling is being afraid to talk about them.

I've started practising martial arts again. I'm learning some Muay Boran sets. As usual, I'm not rushing my learning, because I want to understand everything thoroughly - to gain better understanding and to refine the movements. To be honest, I'm doing it mainly because it feels good to move this way again. It feels like an antidote to the emotional pot being stirred by dancing, or at least enables me to better deal with it.

So, yeah, I'm changing. I hate using this phrase, but I suppose I'm finding myself. I'm aware that every time I've been through difficult times, I've started practising martial arts again. There's something in that.