I hope this trip to Dairy Hollow gives me the courage to be as honest in my public writing as I want to be, but when I’ve been honest in my private life over the past few years it has cost me—and I’m scared to pay the same price in my professional life that I have paid personally.
It’s a simple price: Stop hiding. “Educate others in what you intuitively know; they need it as badly as you did.”
When you the pay the price though, you do get something in return. And in my private life, for every person I had to walk away from, and every person who walked out on me, I received knowledge. Knowledge about where my foundation was faulty.
I learned how don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel filtered through generations and colored the world I was raised in. I learned how there would be people who loved me for the very things’ others had threatened to abandon me for for decades. I learned that feeling was not something to be punished for, but something that made me stronger, braver, and a threat to unexamined dysfunctional systems.
And as I made it through the learning I understood: the price was worth it.
I could build upon new foundations of self-care, unconditional love, honest communication, and an unflinching willingness to mine the truth of what was in order to build what could be.
The building part was lonely at first, but the more open I was about what I was experiencing the more aligned people came to me. Those people showed me I didn’t have to compartmentalize and mitigate myself to be accepted. Those people celebrated the very things that made me feel outcast amongst others. And those aligned people supported me emotionally, financially, and brought me opportunities, saying, “How can I help?”
My intuition replied to their question for me. “Stop hiding. Go unapologetically public. No more compartmentalizing intuitive talents behind closed doors. Integrate. Integrate. Integrate.”
Intuition speaks in symbolism, so I responded by agreeing to do tarot card readings publicly at a summer solstice party at my friend’s brewery. It’s as public as public can be and sends a hell-of-a symbolic statement that I’m doing my best to comply.
I’m scared, but I will do it scared. I don’t know how accurate I can be in a crowded, public place, but I will get confirmations (or confusions) to help me understand. I don’t know how my body will respond to three hours of readings for innumerable people, but I will learn by the time the sun goes down.
It feels like the hard, lonely parts won’t be as hard and lonely in my professional life as it was in my private life, but memory of that pain has kept me hesitant.
I hope the hesitancy withers under the summer solstice. That the longest day of the year burns through the last of my doubt and illuminates the steps beyond Dairy Hollow and the person I used to be.