Answering for myself, and honestly, I am reckless, spontaneous, loving, able to say sorry, aware, intuitive. I make endless mistakes, move too quick into situations, pull back too quick as well. I am naughty, looking always and everywhere for the chance of harmless mischief, wherein, I have noticed, only I ever get sent to the corner. How is it, I ask myself, that this still defines me at almost 72? I have no answer for that one. I think that, finally, I have come to terms with what seems to run like blood through my veins. I just can’t not be who I am.

Controlled, or so it seems, by these qualities, and as a youngster, I found myself often having to apologise for my, well, self, because in those days I heard, until it almost took me out, the rules by which it was acceptable to present oneself, and they just did not fit. Music began, my feet tapped into jig; someone said something and I was unable not to respond. I moved away from encounters, situations, circumstances feeling like a blue alien all the way up to when the rulebook annulled me. I remember that time, the compliance strangling me like a corset, and it was the same as a young wife. Oh, a lot of me was ‘acceptable’, until it wasn’t and the ‘wasn’t’ came from someone else. It was like living in a constant storm. Funny, is it not, that our past continues to trigger things in our present? However, and notwithstanding all that learning and behaving and feeling corseted on the way to strangulation, I now believe I have held on to me.

The wind is high tonight, red in the weather app, but that app isn’t promising 70mph gusts, as of last weekend, scary as hell. These gusts are coming in from the other direction, and at the most, 40mph. Piddling, really, in a land and history of a great deal of gusting. It thinks me. Sideswipes come at all of us throughout our lives, gusts which could, if we let them, take us down. I don’t like being down. So, what do we do to prepare for that which might come, and often does? Now that is a good question, a very good one. My belief is that we all have the power to stand, as a self, against any constrictive or blasting force outside of who we know we are. We cannot control the weather without, but we most definitely can control the weather within. No matter the corsetry constraints of youth and beyond, we know who we are. The hard part is stepping out in those boots. It’s worth it, I promise you, no matter the battle.