Many of you have read my book Dancing With Crazy. When that project took a hold of me it wouldn't let go. It drove me relentlessly for nearly ten years while I processed, wrote
and completed it – all the while dreaming about how amazing it would be to have
it done and out there. I expected a lot of things. I expected it to feel
amazing – it did. I expected some people to love it – they did. I expected some
people to hate it – good Lord, did they ever. What I didn't expect was that the
moment I had the book in hand, I would be completely done with the conversation
that the book was instigating. It was time to get out there and market the hell
out of it so it could be the wild success I wanted it to be but, literally,
every time I opened my mouth to talk about the Mormon Church, or the gays, or
the Mormon gays or every horrifying and painful thing that had ever happened to
me – my throat closed off, my brain shut down, my chest became unbearably heavy
and I could not speak. It felt like
it was a language that I no longer knew how to communicate with.
I was equally thrilled and devastated. I had worked
so hard and needed to support my family but had to accept that Dancing With Crazy had done for me what it was meant to do. It continues
to do well on its own – all things considered. And I have spent the past two years
sitting and asking and listening and getting clear about what’s next for me –
both personally and professionally.
I am so humbled to look back and see how clearly I
have been led, protected and supported by Life and the exquisite spirituality I
have finally re-embraced – ten years after dragging my lifeless body out of
religion. The fact that I not only survived all that I survived but that I have
emerged with my sense of self, humor, and purpose intact is pretty damn cool. The fact that roughly three months ago I finally, after nearly four
decades, learned how to get the hell out of my “story” is proof to me that
wonders and miracles do happen after all. I look around me and see people
everywhere that have had the shit kicked out of them and have no idea how to
get back up again. I see people stuck on the same nauseating merry-go-round
that I was on for most of my life. I see people that can’t find the strength
and/or don’t even know how to re-assemble themselves after their personal
tsunamis and obliterations.
Now I am driven by the same love, passion and energy
that once drove me to write my big-fat-story to take the hand of whoever
stumbles upon me and wants to get out of their own big-fat-story and to get
them to realize in their bones that
they are Bigger, Brighter and Better than anything that has ever happened to
them in the same way that I have finally realized that I am Bigger, Brighter and Better than anything that has ever happened to me. No one can tell me that
there is something from which they simply cannot heal. I know they can. I know
you can. And I know that, no matter what my future holds, I will too.
In the name of You and Me and All Humans That Kick
Ass…
