Happy New Year!

What a spectacular evening! Usually New Year’s Eve is a huge let-down of a holiday to me. Something that should mark a moment to pause instead becomes a giant alcoholic mishmash. But this year--I’m in a city that did it right. Oh my heavens! Magical!!!

So, my New Year’s resolution is really, really, to respect and nurture myself, especially my health and my talent. With kindness and with focus.

I also have a New Year’s Realization and a New Year’s wish. The realization means the blog may change.

For a while, I’ve needed this blog to figure myself out. It has been a place where have felt like it mattered, a tiny bit, to work out my stuff. The fact is, a lot of us are confused about sex, and so even though very few people read this, it still felt like peeling some of the layers of my onion mattered, a little. Like maybe someone in my shoes would someday stumble on it when they needed it.

I’ve been clearer about what I’m feeling when I write something for here than for a diary. Frankly--it’s done more for me than any therapy ever has. I don't exactly know why, but it has.

The blog demanded a level of accountability. God knows I’ve lied to therapists, but not here. The anonymity created a safe place to explore all my neurosis to the root of the belly button lint. I also needed to be clear about what I felt so that I could write something worth reading, at least to my standards, and that meant peeling the layers away, layer by layer.

And then, two nights ago, I had insomnia and I sent “John” an e-mail that pretty much summed up all I’d been trying to figure out. All the layers of the onion. The last one. If there’s something else (and who knows--there may well be), I haven’t a clue what it is. The layer wasn't all that spectacular: I just realized that I felt like damaged goods and knew I shouldn’t have ‘baggage’ and didn’t want him to realize how much baggage I’ve got. And my futile attempts to hide that baggage caused most of our difficulties. And Monday, I owned it clearly and openly.

John replied in a warm, loving, wise, kind, embracing and joyful way. A gem of a gift.

And something shifted inside of me. All of a sudden, all my yearning for clarity--I want more. I didn't reprint my original e-mail here--even though it does, in a way, belong here. I don’t want to figure myself out to share it anonymously with a blog and perchance a few, occasional, readers. I want to share it with John. And I want to protect that shared intimacy.

I think that I came to assume that no man would ever want to share this element of my inner journey. It is so different from the typical American experience. This blog (and it had several variations before this at various places, including quite a bit of the message boards and on my profile on CollarMe), it was a way I could explore my inner stuff without imposing it on whoever I happened to be involved with. But I felt, deep down, that my inner-explorations would absolutely be an imposition.

But John is different. His values are so much in tune with mine. He cares about this side. It is what brought us together. I don't want to be doing some of this that he doesn't know about, some that he does. It is too confusing. I'm more interested in integrating than further bifurcation.

I asked John what he felt about my blog, what I could write about that involved him, and he didn't know. But I'm beginning to know. I think this might dilute what John and I might have a chance at building. It's weird, because I don't think we would have had a chance at building anything without the blog, but now, it might get in the way. And I don't want to risk that.

I don’t know what that means for this blog, but I don’t want to waste anyone’s time on boring “and then she said” entries, so it may become even more intermittent. I promise that I will only write what is true. Not factually; that’s boring (and I have no interest in disclosing who I am), but emotionally. And I will try to continue delving when I post. I expect it will be more about other stuff--work, parents, all that jazz, and the angst regarding my sense of eros will be a much less dominant theme.

For the first time, however, I’m not posting what matters most to me here. My wish for myself for the New Year is private.

But for us all: Happy 2009. May we all live joyously and honestly, with wisdom and courage, risking where it matters and protecting ourselves where needed so that we have the resilience to be vulnerable where it makes us most alive.