Hiding in Plain Sight: a creative love story

What are you hiding?

From yourself?

From others?

Your love of sci-fi, your belief in a magical Universe, your body, your voice, your sexual preference(s)?

What do you keep carefully cloaked, afraid to reveal for risk of judgment, rejection, abandonment?

What is standing between the you of today and the you that you dream of being?

Over the past two weeks I’ve had a powerful reckoning with my own hiding.

There’s more to come, I’m sure, as integration is always a process.

But while on a retreat in Glastonbury, England this past month, there was a singular message, calling me home to myself, again and again.

Remember.

Remember.

Share.

My friend, I’ve been hiding.

Behind the lover of words and teaching and learning, behind the purple hair, and web designing, and writing about deep authenticity, I’ve been on a journey to find my own voice as well.

And as I walked the ruins of the Glastonbury Abbey, climbed to the top of the Tor, and to the bottom of Merlin’s Cave at Tintagel, it called me.

Sing, it said.

Share your voice, it insisted.

And because I was in a strange place and surrounded by the deep support of my retreat sisters, I heeded the call for the first time in years.

And the reunion was sweet.

Standing on rocks, the ocean tide rushing in, I took a breath and let out the song the Universe gave me. Words cannot do it justice, but it was the culmination, in a way, of everything I’ve been sharing and learning and working to embody for the past several years.

It was effortless. It was free. It was connected. It was exalting.

I have had a love/hate relationship with my voice for years. At times, overjoyed with its strength and progress and at others dismayed by its brokenness. I have rebuilt it, nurtured it, listened to it, birthed babies with it and put them to sleep. I have also abandoned it for years at a time, convinced it was not for me, not my true calling, and that I could never have the success or affect with it I secretly wanted. I was hiding. Even as I taught voice, talked about voice, helped myriads of students connect with their true voice, inside and out. I was denying my own voice the opportunity to sing out, to cry out from my soul.

Why do I share this with you today?

Because I know you’re likely hiding something, too. And if there is purpose in my struggle it is to give voice to yours, too.

If we are to rise, to uncover our authentic voice, to heal the world with the unique song of our souls and creations of our hearts, we must stop hiding.

From ourselves, most of all.

So I ask again,

What are you hiding?

What has been begging to be expressed?

What do you keep wrapped in the bottom of your treasure chest, afraid to let anyone see?

And what might it be like to unfurl it into the world?

In the interest of fully stepping out - an offering, from my soul to yours: