It is now into the fourth week since my Ethics Complaint was submitted. I have been advised that my first response from the Committee will be tendered no later than six weeks. With this in mind, overall, I have taken the stricture quite well, distracting myself with other meaningful areas of my life.
Still, by today, I am feeling a bit hemmed in, an emotional state exacerbated by the state of emergency brought about by the incessant rains and resultant flooding here, including significant flood damage on the property of New Horizons Harpers Ferry Retreat Center where flood disaster crews will be working for quite some time on repairs.
All routes to nearby main highways are blocked with a rock slide having fallen across our Potomac River access road, obstructing through traffic possibly taking as long as six months to one year or more to repair.
Why not feel restricted with conditions such as this?
"How" not to feel confined might be the more apt question.
To date I have been able to manage this time of the Ethics Committee’s deliberations on my submission with relative calm.
Meditation on a daily basis, of course, keeps me grounded, as well as connected to Divine Source energies. And, yesterday, the rains and runoff waters had subsided enough for me to begin to return to a, more or less, regular, daily mountain road trek.
But life, these days, is difficult and trying.
Last week a trip to the closest supermarket I could find for grocery shopping took me almost ninety minutes to reach my destination; a usual trip taking only twenty minutes or so.
The temporary halting of my newly developed interest in being more sociable, less of a hermit is, obviously, curtailed.
Some of the time, these past weeks, I have had imaginary conversations with the committee members who have no actual faces for me and only a few names, also without faces.
I inquire of these mentally made up images what they are thinking about my submitted documents, creating an imaginary dialogue on the issues my ethics complaint spotlight.
Sometimes I re-read portions of the documents I sent, imagining one type person or another reading what I have written, contemplating my words.
I go on, sometimes, from this to imagining feelings my words may have evoked in these unknown committee members. On occasion I lean more toward female reactions, other times toward the males.
I have asked the members of the Committee, above and beyond all, to manage their eventual responses with caring and compassion, a subtle or not so subtle attempt on my part to forestall and offset the initial hostilities I experienced at the onset of my first contacts with the two original committee co-chairs.
Each day I do my best to stay positive, visualizing positive outcomes as forthcoming.
However, I can't help but wishing a formal response to my arduous efforts will not be far off.
Then what?
In my imaginings I visualize further details being requested. More documents to put meat on the bare bones of information I have already provided.
Thus an extended term of enforced silence, on my part, as long as my complaint remains in its initial pending status, requiring the utmost confidentiality.
Shifting my attentions beyond these constraints, I take up a longer range contemplation, imagining my life’s direction after this process ends – someday soon I hope.
I anticipate positive results. After all I have made a good case for my complaint.
How could there be anything but an affirming and supportive outcome for me?
Some kind of new freedom awaits me, I think, a liberation for my feminine soul that wishes only to be free and happy!
“What do I want for my future, after this term of deliberation,” I ask myself?
More than anything I want to be free to make my truth a known reality -- and -- live that truth to its heights!
I want to come out of the hiding I hadn't been aware I was doing!
I want to be FREE to be wholly me, fully who I am, transparent and whole!
For this I yearn with every cell of my being!
I began writing this blog eight years ago.
When I began I quoted these words from a poem that I knew and loved –
“I wear a thousand masks – and all of them are me.”Those words truly exemplified where I was back then.
I had started masking myself when I was about nine years old when my mother had her breakdown, following the death of my baby sister. Wearing a mask over my terrified inner being became habitual, so much so I began to know no other way.
Hiding out beneath surface chatter became habituated, protective, safe and eventually convenient.
So familiar had it become that after a while what had become a means to safeguard myself from the anticipated daily onslaughts of a borderline personality disordered and dangerous mother became a lifestyle for me; my way of being in a world I deemed unsafe.
I don't like that way anymore!
I don’t need that way anymore!
I know how to live well, now and I love that way that have worked so hard to achieve.
In a recent story on NPR titled “MeToo Complaints Swamp Human Resource Departments,” Shelly Ruzicka, a spokesperson for Arise Chicago, a faith-based worker-advocacy groups, stated --
“…. because they filed complaints….they were told not to discuss their stories while their cases are pending. "And so what we find is that women, even though they are brave enough to stand up and have somehow made it through the process this far, is they're once again feeling trapped and feeling silenced..”
This is #Metoo!!!
While I seem to be managing the entrapment our local flood disaster has brought, the limitations imposed on me, as a result of the confidentiality demands of my ethics complaint give me the feeling that I am under a gag order, as if in a court trial, worse still sometimes I feel as if I am under house arrest with all the surrounding road closures.
I hate this!
I want to be free!
I want to go on my way as Anastasia The Storyteller, on my blogs, on my radio show, in public forums, telling my stories to help make this world a better place – and assert my right to be wholly me, in public and --
hide no more!
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