Many moons ago, my former therapist said to me that I was like a matador. I could use flashes of brilliance and "over-functioning" to distract and seduce someone's attention away from my banged-up heart, or the rising heat of my flustered not-knowingness, or a sudden feeling of aloneness so piercing that I felt like I was being swallowed alive.
As I have grown in capacity and potency, so has my matador. With an intentional and taut whip of the red scarf of sensual language or poetic metaphor, I can now bring hundreds of people to places of deeper illumination about themselves, the psyche, or the world around us. While I am grateful for this potency and transmission, it is also true that the deepest, most shadow-inflected and vulnerable parts of me stand slightly to the side. The stampeding and bloodied bull charges towards this thing I hold apart from me, red like fresh blood and raw rubies, brutal arrows like shark's teeth of my fear, shame, and ego pummeling its heaving, dying form.
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