This is a sacred space.
It is my quiet – where my thoughts flow across a clean, white screen with no smudges and smears.
It is a private space with a door opening to the outside allowing others to peek in within the safety of words drawing boundaries with their intimacy.
I write boldly about my feelings in the most cautious way.
I use words that make it clear I am in control, and you have no place here.
I don’t get many comments or likes.
I get viewers…readers who peek into my soul and know that they belong on their side of the glass…watching and listening while minding the signs.
KEEP OFF
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH
DO NOT CROSS RED LINE.
I drew the lines carefully and consciously when I first began finding myself in this sacred space. I was afraid of any response – afraid someone else would enter and rip me apart. I wrote deeply always from a place of feeling…of individual perception…of no judgment.
I feel…I am…my heart…my soul…
Rarely you…you don’t belong here in my innermost feels.
It was a good strategy, even though it isolated me in the blogosphere and kept me under the radar.
But I need to shatter the walls for a moment to talk about Sarah Tuttle-Singer.
For years I read her words with an eagerness pulling at my heart.
Her sentences painted pictures I could immerse in; her thoughts turned me inside out and forced me to re-examine where I thought I fit in.
And I watched her sacred space fall prey to hate.
Vicous, horrifying hate.
But I’m a coward, so I continued lurking and quietly congratulating myself for keeping my little corner here empty.
I don’t want to be a coward.
I want to stand up and say how much I respect her as a writer, how much I admire her courage to face off against all the assholes. I want to stand beside her and swing at each jerky fastball heading her way. I want to claim how little of a shit I give about our differences and how much I connect to our similarities.
The thing is, I’m scared of you.
Here’s the biggest secret I hide beneath my broken past…
In my here and now, with all the pain and suffering behind me, I am what you some of you would call a liberal fucktard. I am so open-minded my brains sometimes fall out. I lean wildly to the left even as my roots try to pull me towards the center. I fight for equality and understanding and acceptance. I’m not always articulate, and I don’t have an academic background to lean against. But I’m a severe empath, and I get ravaged by other people’s feelings.
I’m also deathly afraid of you yelling at me.
I retreat and retreat until my head is deeply embedded in any sand it can find just so I don’t have to defend the thoughts I can barely control.
And then I read words I recognize as my truth, and I have to stand up and join the fight.
I don’t know if I can do more than this.
I don’t know how much my heart can take.
I may go back to bleeding all over this space the way I always have.
I may seal myself in and curl into the ball on the floor you don’t have to address.
But for this one moment, I am standing up and screaming out to the world from inside my warm, safe cave.
Just shut up.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer should be able to pour herself out onto blank pages without you telling her to die, or that she should be raped, or that she is evil.
You don’t have to like what she says, or who she is if you want to make it personal.
You can disagree with her and try to debate whatever you want with her.
Enough with the hate I can feel sizzling through my screen.
Maybe try to listen.
To open up and see her soul. It’s right there in front of you.
It’s beautiful.
Colloquially Speaking 