You know that feeling when a scab pulls off?  It itches, so you can't leave it alone, but maybe it's not quite ready to come off yet, so it hurts to pull on it, but then when it's finally off, it feels so much better.  Yeah, that feeling.  I seem to go through that every few years or so.  Maybe shedding a skin would be a better analogy.  A major change coming on-- emotional, psychological, spiritual, who knows what.  It is uncomfortably close to painful, so you resist as hard as you can, but you can't leave it alone either.  And you don't know what it will be like after the change has come, so you're a little scared.  Why am I using second person?  there's no "you" about this.  This is me.

I've been through this enough times to know the feeling.  It happened when I was leaving Evangelicalism, because it had gotten to the point where it felt like my skin didn't fit anymore.  There was no avoiding it.  In some ways, I didn't really even have a choice.  I had to go.  It felt like reaching down into my guts and pulling some growth or tumor out by the roots.  Scary and disgusting and slimy and exhilarating and freeing all at the same time.  And then again after my daughter was born twenty years ago.  I had so many preconceived ideas of what it was going to be like to be a mom, but very few of them turned out to be true.  I had made many noisy, loud opinionated statements about what being a mom "should" be like, and I ended up having to eat major amounts of crow.  It just wasn't like I thought it was going to be, and I had to give up some ideas that felt very close to identifying the "real" me in order to do what mattered more to me than anything else ever had:  to be a good mom.  And then about fifteen years ago, my husband and I were separated for a year.  I marched into marriage counseling with my outrage clutched tightly to my chest, all the lists of ways that my husband had betrayed me or insulted me or otherwise not been whatever I thought he was supposed to be.  And then slowly, gradually, over many months of therapy, I had to come to see the ways in which I was right there, right in the middle of the ways our marriage wasn't working, equally if not more responsible for the mess it had become.  Once again, I had to give up a way of thinking that felt like it was me, that felt like it defined who I was, and if I let it go, I was afraid I would become something I wasn't.  Oh, Lord, is that convoluted, but I'm trying to explain how it felt.

But once the old way of thinking was gone, I discovered two things.  One was that I was still me.  There was a "me" there behind the thinking that survived.  and two-- the new way of thinking was so much better.  All the scariness and the pushing through my resistance was worth it.  but there was no way to know that ahead of time.  Ahead of time, it was just plain terrifying.

I seem to be there again.  I think I'm getting toward the end of the cycle-- this has been going on for several months, but I just haven't been sure how to say it.  I'm still not sure I can describe exactly what I'm leaving behind this time.  But I just know that it's terrifying.  I'm older now, and far less likely to throw caution to the wind, and I know for sure that I wouldn't be able to do it this time if it weren't for the fact that I've been here before.  I know it will be better on the other side.  But giving up a way of thinking, a way that feels like your way of being, scares the shit out of me.  I'm terrified, but I can't leave it alone, and it is in some ways inevitable, even though I'm fighting it as hard as I can.