I am from....

I echo the thanks to those that were willing to share a piece of them with the class. Thank you to everyone else for listening and keeping the room safe for all of us. At the end of a long week when I was tired and trying to stay engaged, this was a difficult exercise for me. I could hear Emily next to me writing the whole time and found myself staring at my paper. Where am I really from? Sure, I had some thoughts down, but nothing I felt like was worth sharing. But two things to that. The first relates to what Jonah said-The point is not how deep it is or if it makes you cry. The point is self reflection. Should we go deeper? Sure. But an archeologist doesn't dig to the bottom all at once. They go layer by layer to see what's on the way. What's on the surface and middle layers are important, too. Whatever we wrote was still about us, and that is something. The other point was for myself. Brendan and Heather both said something that rung true with me. Brendan said something to the effect of sharing all his secrets but hiding his deepest secrets. Heather said she was an open book but a diary under lock and key. Those both felt so true of me as well, and I would guess many of us. It's so hard to share deeply personal things about ourselves. But it's also hard to think about those things a lot of times. There is a lot that I know I am not letting get up to the surface right now. I don't want to deal with it at the moment. It will come out for me, I can't hide from myself forever. But for now I keep some things under lock and key.