I used to be fearless.

I used to be afraid of everything.

I was never a physically daring child. I knew the value of my hands and eyes to myself, and tried not to play in ways that would endanger them. My body could be broken, I could go deaf, but as long as i had my hands and my eyes and my brain I could still create. I could still love my world and all its sharp-edged and dangerous things if I could pour myself out onto paper or computer screen.

But other than that, I was fearless. I was a neophile; I loved new and shiny things. I loved my small freedoms; when my family went camping, I was allowed to go for rambles in the woods, because my parents trusted that I knew what I was doing and I'd be back for dinner.

I'd step away from the campsite and into my own world. I was a fearless adventurer, an apprentice to the local herb woman, a falcon or cougar living among the rocks, a deer moving soundlessly through the forest. I climbed rocks and lay on my belly in the sun, being a lizard with half-slit eyes.

I was perfectly safe because this was my own world. Nothing here would harm me. I saw snakes and lizards and deer and once something that was a cat of some kind, a bobcat, I think. I smelled the air and tasted the way the ground lay. I crawled through manzanita and came out sticky and smelling of sap and pine needles. I changed shape a thousand times on these rambles and never thought anything of it. I was relieved to be alone, where I could walk through the shimmering curtain that seperated my world from the one other people lived in and not fear discovery.

It was that other world, the world where other people lived, that I was afraid.

I did not know what people wanted of me. They were large and unpredictable, doing incomprehensible things for reasons that I couldn't understand, moving like clockwork people, ticking like bombs. And I was terrified they could see through me. My eyes have always been openings into my soul, and meeting people's eyes was dangerous. And it hurt, because I could see things I didn't want to know.

I revealed too much, I thought, and people revealed too much back. And eventually, avoiding peoples' eyes became a habit.

I think back now and I remember that my life was like attempting to dance while erratic planets whizzed by me on a dimly lit stage. The thought of the future, of growing up, was filled with terror. The idea of having to deal with this weird world on its own terms was enough to make me go screaming back towards my hidey-hole.

Not much of this got through to other people. My mother, from the little we've talked about it, always thought I was somewhat abnormal. She attempted, in her own way, to protect me from the world I had trouble meeting on its own terms; mandating that I stay a child far longer than most of my peers. My clothing, my hair, the fact that I wasn't allowed to shave my legs. And, yeah, this made my life with my peers hideously awful, but from my lofty and aged perspective today it seems as if I'd have had hideous awfulness no matter what my mom and anyone else did. When one starts to care about the planets that are screaming by you in the dark, you sort of have to accept that the inevitable collisions are going to hurt. At least until you figure out how they're spinning and start to get a handle on why.

And I did get by; I don't have a whole lot of memories, but from what I remember I was as pleasant as I could possibly have been while lacking any sort of understanding of what the hell was going on, and I'd developed a nice shiny facade that few people saw the need to puncture. I was pretty pleased with myself, as I recall. The facade was there and so people in the outer world were satisfied,and I could get on with what I thought of as the real work of my life--writing, imagining, and living entirely in my own self-contained world.

The intervening years have changed that. My facade got broken along the way, as I started to recognize it as a pathology, a coping mechanism, a method for keeping people out. I left California in order to change myself, to see what I was like underneath. To figure out who I might be if I let the world see the real me.

And slowly, through changes and evolutions and a process that a lot of the time has seemed like throwing myself at the same wall over and over again, I've learned a few things:

That, given the opportunity to see the parts of me that are broken or tender or silly or ignorant, most people will not attack said parts.

But some people will.

That the world that I first had to take entirely on faith is actually somewhat real, even if there are things (like income taxes, Quake, and internal combustion engines) that I don't understand.

That most everyone *else* is also lost and uncertian much of the time. This, remarkably enough, is a great comfort. (Hell, I think I'm one of the least lost people I know much of the time, though that uncertianty thing still gets me.)

That it's generally okay to be genuine.

So I practice being myself. I forget things; I repeat myself; I tell stories that *everyone* has heard before. I try to trust the world.

The person that people meet these days *is* me. They may meet more of one part than another, I may have days still when I lose time, I may still be of two minds about this whole mental health thing--but I'm here, I'm consistently living in my body and my world, I'm not (generally) hiding from the outside world.

(I still reserve the right to go away during painful medical procedures, though.)

I can't say I'm through with fragmentation. (mmm, yes, the lovely euphemisms we use.) Hell, I still have the whole want/don't want dichotomy going on, and that still has long, sharp pointy teeth that I'm not quite sure how to start filing down.

All things considered, I feel more whole than I have for a while. I don't think I'm being bombarded with planets any more; I am considering possibly a place in the heavens for myself. Perhaps a nebula, or one of those nifty binary systems where there is a fragile and dangerous equilibrium between gravity and momentum.

Or maybe I'll just be a star. Get born, live for a while, expand into a red giant and then collapse down into a neutron star or a pulsar.

I try to meet people's eyes these days. Avoiding others' gazes is a habit, and it takes concious effort to overcome that effort. My gaze seems oddly powerful, sometimes; sometimes it seems as if i was right, all those years ago, when I thought that if I looked people in the eyes they would see right through me.

And, sometimes, when I want them to, they do. Especially when I want to say something with my eyes that I can't quite bring myself to say with words; joy, lust, or love.

Sometimes all three.

Still, I'm shy; I don't want to make anyone else uncomfortable, and unless someone is *very* bold in letting me know that, yes, they might not mind if I looked at them with my heart in my eyes, I tend not to.

But that, as they say, a story for another day.

(I went to a housewarming. I had a fabulous time. I will write about it tomorrow, I promise. This just spilled out of me tonight, and it's not two and a half hours past when I wanted to be in bed so I am going to upload this and go to bed *now*.)

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