I need to make my peace with the fact that I am a romantic. It flies in the face of the persona I've spent my life constructing. I wanted to be someone logical, ordered, rational, but with a poetic soul. It's not that I'm not those things. But I am more intuitive than I thought, more given to daydreaming than I would have allowed to be acceptable in terms of the way I conduct myself. I have a cadre of standards, codes of behavior for myself and others. And they have hemmed me in.

They cause me to appear closed off to the person I most want to open myself to.

All of my prayers these days are to be unafraid to inhabit the moments of my life. I want to be rid of that damnable self-consciousness that is so myopia-inducing, I can't even see what's real.