I have told my story, read and reread it, edited and proofed it, polished and published it. So goodbye to all that. I slam the door on the past. I emerge from the underworld and do not miss the lost souls trapped forever in their own obsessions and compulsions, in their own habits and temperaments. I was taught to see myself only in other people’s eyes: those who judged me, criticized me, found me wanting, dismissed me as wrong and troublesome, nothing but a problem. Looking through my own eyes, at myself and at the world, is a challenge I rise to meet. I need no guides, and I honor no judges except my own heart. I abandon any audience and leave them to find their own drama and their own theater. The show is over, the script is in shreds. What clothes I wear are functional; my being, activity, and speech are but a manifestation of my nature shaped by experience, life lived, living, to be lived.
