Performance is the clanging gong of a loud drum that reverberates in your soul and distracts you from deep living

Oh, the need to perform.
How it turns the most honest among us into the subtlest of liars.
Sometimes I feel the need to perform.
Even after all I have learned and how far I have come,
I still feel the need to perform.
It is no longer my daily focus, but from time to time, It is like a haunting whisper, like a subtle breeze of smoke that isn't directly in my face, but still causes my airways to constrict and I cough.
They judged me before, and it hurt. They could do it again.
This is the smoke.
My life cough.

I have felt the mangled claw of judgement scratch its way down my back when, (if you had known my heart) all I was trying to do was hold that which was the most dear and keep it from falling. But as I juggle wiggled my way to an imagined "balance," I felt the whispered criticism, and it stung.  So then all I wanted to do was hide.

Even before the fallout of the life I knew four years ago, I felt judged. Not liked.  Embarrassed and awkward in ways that other people were not, according to my estimation.

Examples might be: The times I tried out for cheerleading (didn't make it...three years in a row), drill squad (didn't make it, then they had a second pity try out, where I did make it because everyone made it, but then I was unable to be on the team because it was too expensive, which was more humiliating that if I had never made the team.), 
-Running for student body anything (Didn't make it. Ever.)

-and all the times I mangled anything, was clumsy or careless, was in any way learning something that would take years of HINDSIGHT to finally manage gingerly, if not perfectly, but in the moment, I had not achieved the place of hindsight yet.

 There comes a time when you realize you (by "You," I mean "I," of course.) cannot keep parceling out parts of your (my) heart, only showing this side or that side to anyone who comes around, once I have determined which side of me that person will approve of, will want to see.  There comes a time when that sort of daily figuring and rearranging takes up too much mental energy, since all of these things are all the sides of all of me. (I am good at this, I am not good at this, this, or this.  And this thing here, I struggle to maintain it.)  The picture is not complete if I have to keep slicing myself into fractures.  It hurts too much to cut myself in these mentally mutilated ways.
And that's the thing: It's in my head, It's all in my head, And you do not have to understand my life, how I ended up here, or the way I believe the Lord has instructed me to accomplish the tasks He daily gives me,* the ways He is personally teaching me to stand strong in daily battle, to walk in my freedoms, but not to abuse it or use it to again bind myself, a slave.
Even if I am only a slave to my perception of judgement.
I am free of that.
I AM FREE.
I no longer explain myself to those whose campfires have grown cold.
And yet the smoke, how it wafts around my nostrils.
I am just camping out here on this campground called Earth.
 I sit at my campfire roasting marshmallows of Mercy.  The smoke says "You burned the edges of your marshmallow, you RUINED it. You have made a mockery of life, you have ruined, you ARE ruined."
And yet I take a bite, and find that the searing and blackening on the outside of that marshmallow are covering a soft gooey sweetness of grace I would have never known was there, had the edges not scorched to preserve the middle part.
I lick my sticky fingers.
They remind me.
The sticky goo of grace, which stays behind, which does not easily wash off after the marshmallow has been eaten.

Another smoke from another fire:
There are those who have always loved me, though I knew not how to always accept their love.  While I was at my lowest, my most embarrassing.
 Those who knew how to genuinely love never mocked me or pointed out my awkwardness; my entire life awkwardness.  They just kept a spoon in the pot bubbling over their own campfire,  kept scooping out the love meat into my starving bowl.  

And yet, at the time, I didn't know how to accept it, I wanted to run from yes, even that which would nurture me to health and wholeness and help support me when my balance went wonky.

    It's taken 38 years to learn to stay.  To not turn my head in order to catch a whiff of the smoke from past destruction. It has taken 38 years to figure out exactly why I run.  It is a daily practice.

     The problem with judgment is this.  maybe I truly am the thing you are judging me for.  Maybe I truly did or am currently doing that thing you don't like.  But the judgement doesn't lead to my repentance.  It only leads me to run and hide some more.  
It's the Lord's kindness that leads us to repentance.
("Do you show contempt for the riches of His kindness, forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?" -Romans 2:4)
So maybe just maybe we could also employ this method.
(*she preaches to herself*)

-XOXO,

*But the conversation is always open, the chance to truly hear and be heard, and some of this life story has been written out in posts like the one I wrote on Sept 11, 2014, and then again the post I wrote on Sept 30, 2014