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Saturday, October 24, 2015

MARY: So, as usual, I figured I’d share part of my journey this year with all of you because I think it’s relevant to what Elias has been talking about, and I think it’s probably relevant to lots of people in their own experiences.

My journey this year has been… I think my big lesson this year has been learning how to express feelings, which is not a big strong suit of mine; I’ve never been really very good at it. And I believe I was taught very well when I was a child not to do that at all, and I learned it really good.

And it’s been a lot of experiences this year of smacking me in the face with this how to express feelings, which is really interesting because when you learn how to not do that, you don’t know how, and it becomes really difficult. And even when you’re aware and you’re thinking about it and you want to do that, or whatever, in any given situation you may not actually, at least I haven’t, know what would BE an expression of feeling.

FEMALE: Agreed.

MARY: When you are in a situation, let’s say you are having a conversation with somebody and they say something that tweaks you or upsets you, not personally, but just in general.

Let’s just say, I was having a conversation with my groomer for the dogs, and she was talking to me about one of her clients who really doesn’t take care of their dog and is just really neglectful, and whatever. And while I am listening to this, I was getting really upset; it bothered me a lot. And I thought about it. Now, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything; I just listened. And then when I got in my car to leave, I was thinking about it and I was like, “How would I even express what I was feeling?”

I’m like, “I was upset, okay. What was I upset about?” And I went through all these steps of, you know, really defining what I was feeling and what it meant to me. And just like Elias talks about and, you know, I realized, “Okay, well it really bothers me when people are mean to animals or children and they’re neglectful, and it makes me sad and it makes me angry. And how the heck do I express that? What do I do with it? I mean, what does it even look like to express that?” And I didn’t know. And so I did nothing.

But even in other situations, I had a situation where I was with my granddaughter and we were going to buy a birthday present for my daughter. And we were having a great time and we went to a couple of different shops. And I was thinking and FEELING inside of myself, “This is such a great kid; I love this kid. She’s so sweet and she’s such a great kid, and I really appreciate her.” I once again said nothing; I just thought it and I didn’t do anything either. And then a little while later it occurred to me again, and I thought about it and I was like, “Okay, what would I do? How would I express that?”

I mean, it doesn’t matter if it’s something that I’m upset about or something that’s good. I didn’t... And I know that sounds kind of silly that it seems very simple: How would you express that you really appreciate a child? I couldn’t think of something until several hours later it occurred to me, “Oh, I probably could have just gone up and hugged her.” Or I could have just said, "You’re such a great kid, Allison." It didn’t occur to me at the moment and I could not think of what to do.

GROUP: (Voices Overlapping­Laughing)

MARY: I couldn’t think of what is... what does that look like? What would it look like to me to express that feeling?

And then there was a situation where I did express myself, which was REALLY uncomfortable. I had a situation - it was actually partially kind of funny, but then it turned not funny. My daughter has a cat and the cat got a mouse and dumped it in her bed.

FEMALE: (Laughing)

MARY: (Chuckles) And at first it was funny, but the cat kind of mangled this mouse, and so my daughter took the mouse and put it in a box and didn’t know what to do with it because it was obviously broken. And so she is, like, talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, about this situation with this mouse and the cat, and whatever.

Okay, I already am not real thrilled with cats, but that... And I’m trying really hard to like her cat (Everyone Laughing) because it lives with me now. But, you know, it’s... This is one of the reasons that I don’t like them, is because that you can’t breed that predator out of them, and they do that. And I get it. It’s a natural thing. It’s just what they do. He’s just being a cat, whatever, it’s fine. BUT her repeating the story was starting to bother me. And by the third time that she repeated the whole story about the whole thing and going through every detail, I was starting to get really upset. And I said, "I can’t listen to you repeat this again. I’m upset and I can’t hear you tell me this again, okay? Which she got upset with me then and was like, “FINE!”, and walked away.

And now, for her, within I would say, five minutes, she was fine. She got it and she understood and she respected what I said. For ME, as soon as she said, "Fine!" and walked away, I felt myself, like cave in on myself, and I wanted to JUMP up out of my seat, run after her and go, "It’s FINE, it’s okay! You know I didn’t mean it. It’s fine if you need to talk about it, it’s okay. You can talk about it. I’ll listen."

And I didn’t, and I sat there in the chair that I was in for the longest five minutes of my life, feeling horrible. Feeling like the worst NON­ACCEPTING CREEP of a person and wanting to fix it, really bad. Wanting to chase after her and make it better and... Which the interesting piece was, is that within about five minutes, it was done. There was no more discussion about it, which is what I wanted. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. And she was fine.

I wasn’t fine but I wasn’t fine because that was an experiment of, “Okay, I’m going to say what I really feel right now.” And it was only one sentence and it was like, “Oh god, I really pissed her off. And this is terrible, and oh now this is going to be a horrible thing and it’s going to go on all day long, and it’s going to be just like this awful thing and what if…” And I kept thinking, “God you’re so NOT accepting. You’re just so… You… why can’t people be different and why can’t somebody else say something and why can’t you just be okay with it?”

But I wasn’t okay with it. And I did realize after I sat there for five minutes and made myself not get up and chase after her and try and fix it, I realized: Oh, it doesn’t turn into an all-day thing. It actually goes away when you do express yourself. And when you do say something or do something, it stops. And it was just that few minutes that was so uncomfortable because I didn’t know what to do.

But this has been an ongoing thing all year, and it’s moved in with me now (Everyone Laughing) to really emphasize it to me. And I also in this process of... you know, I thought it was hard enough just NOTICING feelings and identifying them. Then we’ve got to go and express them and it’s like, “Oh boy, all right. Now I’m really in the shit with this because I don’t how to do that at all.”

But another piece of it was doing things that get interpreted by other people in a completely different way than I intend. That, which has also been VERY emphasized to me since my daughter moved in with me, is that I think for myself, and I think a lot of people experience this. I first of all have lived by myself for a long time. I’m used to doing things in certain ways and I just don’t even think about it. And when she moved in I made a point of saying, AND MEANT IT: "I want this to be OUR house. I want us to be a family in this house together. It’s not my house; it’s not my stuff, it’s ours. And I want you to feel free to change whatever you want to change, and I’m okay with that. You want to move things around? Go for it." Which we have; the whole house has been reconfigured.

GROUP: (Laughing)

MARY: And I genuinely am okay with all of that. BUT I’m used to mindlessly doing things in certain ways, which someone else can interpret very different from how I mean it. But there are two parts of that. The one part is, genuinely, a mindless thing where I’m just doing things that I’m used to doing. I am famous for being oblivious about things in the house, and when they get moved I automatically move them back, and I don’t even notice that I’m doing it. I mean, when I was with Sandy, she used to think that was like the funniest thing ever and tease me about it because she would move things on purpose...

GROUP: (Laughing)

MARY: ...and then go... and then wait and watch me MINDLESSLY move it back to where it goes, and then crack up and go, "You did it again!"

GROUP (Laughing)

MARY: And I do it a lot. Something has a place, and I put it there, and if it gets moved, I move it back. I don’t think about it and there’s no deep seated intension behind it. I mean, there’s no psychological big meaning behind it; it’s just that’s where I’m used to it being and that’s where I put it back.

So when the famous soap bottle (Everyone Laughing) that is on my sink got moved to the other side of the sink - because she does the dishes most of the time and it’s more convenient for her to have it on the other side of the sink - and when it got moved to the other side of the sink, I was in the kitchen by myself at one point, and just automatically moved it to the other side of the sink again.

And then got blasted of, "It’s supposed to be OUR house but it’s YOUR things and they have to go where they go and if anybody moves them, you’re right there controlling and saying, you know, without even saying anything, saying it needs to be where I put it!"

And I was like, "No, that is not my intention at all! I just..."

You know, or a tissue box that got moved, "Why do you keep moving that? I keep putting it there and you keep moving...?"

"Because it was in the way. I don’t know. I just do it. I don’t mean anything by it. It just... I just do it."

But I started to realize there are lots of things that I think I do, or probably most people do, that we do mindlessly and we have no... we have no clue or realization that somebody else can interpret that... Not that I’m catering to someone else, or not that I’m concerned with how someone else is going to perceive what I’m doing, but I do want what I’m doing to match what I mean. I do want to be aware enough of myself so that when I’m doing something, I know that it matches what my intention is. It’s not... There’s no question there that it could be interpreted in a different way.

MARY: Yeah?

MALE: Are you… But in regards to that, you’re not controlling ­ moving that Kleenex box, or soap, or whatever you’re moving and putting in place. You do it mindlessly because that’s part of you. There’s nothing wrong with that.

MARY: Oh, I’m not saying that there’s something WRONG with it. I mean...

MALE: But you are a catalyst for her to show her that it’s okay to move things back and forth.

MARY: Maybe, maybe not. I mean, what my... what was important to me was to realize that I can be doing things sometimes, and I may have a good intention, and it might not be interpreted that way at all. And because what I’m doing doesn’t necessarily match what my intention is.

And now that’s the second part of it, which also involves that feelings, again, that got emphasized in a big way where I did something that I THOUGHT, and my intention was, to be helpful. I was trying to help, and I thought, “Well, there’s so much that has to be done in this house, and there’s so much work that’s being done, and whatever, and my daughter is stressed out.” And so she was gone for a weekend and I decided that I would be nice and I would be helpful and I would take care of all the animals, all of the little pigs, and clean all of their cages myself, and get everything all done and be all nice and clean for when she came home.

Okay, she came home and saw that and hit the ceiling. And the reason she hit the ceiling was because she had said to me a few weeks before, "I’ll take care of mine and you take care of yours, because we do things differently. And I don’t want to get in your way and I don’t want you to get in my way, and so for right now, while we’re adjusting, let’s just, you know, deal with the animals that way."

Okay, well my brain somehow spit that right out and overrode it and went in HELPING direction, and that got interpreted as things need to be my way, and done my way in my time framework, and she’s not doing it fast enough or good enough or whatever. Which was not my intention at all. I was trying to be helpful. BUT I could see - after the blowup and the crazy - I could see by thinking about it how that could be construed that way.

Which the next thing, (Chuckles) I had missed one - one cage; I didn’t have time for one. So there was one left. And I had set all of the stuff ­ the puddle pads, the towels, the fleece, everything ­ on a chair in the dining room getting ready for it to be done. Okay, well after this blow up I was like, “Okay, I’m not doing... (Laughing) I won’t touch (Laughing)... I’m not going to do anything, whatever it might be!” Because that’s me. Back up and go into defense mode, and curl up and cocoon myself and go, you know, “I don’t want to upset anybody.”

And the next morning I came downstairs, and she was still sleeping. And I came downstairs and I saw this pile of stuff for the... to clean this last cage and I was like, “Oh, hell no!” I’m like, “NO, NO, I’m putting it all away!”, (Everyone Laughing) because I noticed that the fleece that I chose... Mindlessly again, the fleece that I chose matched all the other cages. I was like, “Oh, hell no. (Everyone Laughing) It’s all going back in the cabinet. She can pick whatever color she wants, whatever pattern she wants; it doesn’t matter!” I’m like, “I don’t care! I really don’t care! Don’t send a wrong message!”

I can see how some things that I would automatically do, even though I don’t intend them in a certain way, can be interpreted in a certain way. Yeah, picking out the same fleece that matches all the other ones that I picked and did... Well, I can see how that would be interpreted as controlling and it has to be my way and done the way I want it to be done, which is not what I want to communicate.

And so it doesn’t match what my intention is, and I thought about it, and I was like, “Oh, well okay. I’m saying one thing: we’re sharing this, you should feel free to do however you do, be whatever you are. But then I’m doing things, kind of mindlessly, and sometimes not mindlessly, with an intention of being helpful, which is not being helpful. And I’m sending a very different message from - by what I’m doing - from what I want to be saying, or what I want to be intending in my communication. Also a big piece of it is not communicating at all. Not saying what I’m thinking or what I’m feeling. Just being quiet, and then it’s up for interpretation.

I got a cage from a groomer that I was going to fix up and decorate for, to... We are going to be selling our little baby pigs and I was going to fix up this cage so that, you know, somebody might want to take that with one of the little pigs. It’s on the front porch. Donnalie moved it to... next to the back fence with the intention of taking it down to the basement through the bulkhead. I didn’t ask why it was there; I just picked it up and put it back on the porch.

GROUP: (Soft Laughter)

MARY: And so then she was like, "I JUST PUT THAT OVER THERE AND YOU PUT IT BACK ON... WHY DO YOU DO THAT?"

And I was like, "Well, because I don’t want it to get all dirty and get leaves all over it. And I don’t know why you put it by the bench."

And she was like, "I put it by the bench so we could take it down to the basement. You can work on it down there, but it has to go through the bulkhead."

I was like, "Well, that’s smart..."

GROUP: (Laughing)

MARY: "...that’s probably a good idea."

She was like, "But you put it back on the porch! Why do you do that? Why do you come behind me and do...You know, you walk… It’s like you’re always behind me correcting me!"

And I’m like, "Well, I suppose if I would have asked you why it was by the fence, this could have been avoided." But I also did say, "Okay, this is not ONLY me." I did also say, "And for future reference, you could say to me, ‘I put the thing by the fence so we could put it down in the basement, Mom.’ So that I’m not just grabbing it, so that I know: Oh, that’s a good idea. Yeah, we could do that." And I said, "So it does kind of go both ways."

MALE: (Inaudible)

MARY: “Okay, so that would be helpful also for you to communicate to me, too." And... But I’m seeing more and more the point is not her; the point is me. And so when I am looking at me and thinking about me and what I’m doing, the point is what am I not doing or what am I doing that is not communicating what I want to be communicating. And how many times - and this is a big one for me - how many times I back up and shut up and say nothing because I’m afraid of escalating the situation. I don’t want the other person, usually my daughter, to get angry. I don’t want, if she’s already agitated, I don’t want to agitate her even more.

I’m being careful all the time. I’m careful about what OTHER people feel. And in being careful about what other people feel, I’m like shutting mine off and telling myself that I shouldn’t do anything, and I shouldn’t express myself, which just reinforces the whole piece of not even knowing HOW in the first place. So it’s like this vicious circle. I think I’m getting BETTER at it. Now, she’s been there for three months now and I think that a lot of our adjustment period has kind of… we’ve kind of moved through it with a lot of bumps. (Laughs) But we have kind of worked things out for the most part.

But it also has emphasized to me what is also scary about feelings, at least for me, is differences with people. How people think different. How they do things different. How they feel different, and that you don’t always understand. I don’t always understand why somebody else is doing what they’re doing, or how they’re doing it, or why they’re speaking the way they speak, or why something bothers them that seems insignificant to me. Or why something doesn’t bother them that seems really important to me. And with those differences it gets really confusing to try and think about expressing what I’m feeling, because it feels really scary. It feels like there’s just so many opportunities for things to blow up in your face. And that I want to avoid at all costs. And I don’t want to do that.

MALE: It’s the communication between co­creating together. It’s that communication between each other, or whoever it is, that is really dictates your emotion speaking to you, what you are doing and when you will express. So the more you are able to communicate with each other, the more those emotions will change, and you will tell that they line up with more of who you are.

MARY: I agree. But I think that that’s a piece of it, too. Is that I think that because a lot of us have been, maybe not all of us but a lot of us...

MALE: Probably most of us.

MARY...have been taught not to express ourselves and definitely not to express our feelings. That we don’t know how and so we just don’t do it. And, by extension - maybe not intentionally - but we teach that to our children, too. And then they grow up and they don’t know how either.

And so they’re not communicating and we’re not communicating and nobody’s communicating, and then everything just BLOWS up every once in a while and there’s this HUGE drama, and then it all kind of calms down, because when you get the blow­up, then you talk afterwards. But it takes the blow­up to get you to talk, and it’s like: Okay, there’s got to be a better way than this huge, you know, trauma that goes on, then...

But it’s scary. Just like me saying, "I don’t want to talk about the mouse anymore." That was terrifying to me. I was shocked at how hard that was for me to get those words out of my mouth and to not take them back. It was so hard to just say, "I don’t want to talk about this anymore." It was like I might as well have been saying, “I’m going to pour gasoline on myself now and light myself on fire.” (Laughs) I mean, that’s how dramatic and HORRIBLE it felt inside of me, because it’s so unnatural.

And how is she, you know, people will say, Well, she has to learn too, or she has to be a part of this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with her, her, her, her, her. I’m like, “NO, BUT I DIDN’T GIVE HER ANY OF THESE TOOLS EITHER.”

MALE: Right.

MARY: I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO DO IT. I STILL DON’T know how to do it. So how can I expect her to know how to do it? She... I’m her MOTHER; I’m the one who taught her. And did I teach her that? Nope. MALE: You can’t if you don’t know.

MARY: Exactly. And I know that. I’m not blaming myself, because I do know that. And I realize that and I can accept that with myself. I didn’t have the tools, so I couldn’t pass them on. But I can’t expect her or someone else to express themself when I don’t know how to do it. So I have to begin somewhere, and where I have to begin is with me. And move from there. And then if I can do it, then because I’m doing it, then maybe she will do it too, and we can work through it. But it’s a whole process. And it’s hard. It’s really hard, especially when you feel afraid.

And I’m... I have said for years to lots of people: Fear is not something that I experience. The only time I ever experience fear is in an earthquake. Those I’m afraid of. But fear, no; I don’t feel that. Oh I do now. It’s like there’s a lot of scary things out there. There’s a lot of scary interactions. You don’t know what the other person is going to do or how they’re going to respond to you or react to you, or whatever. And it may not be what you expect, and it may not be what you want. And then trying to pull it back to me and, “Okay, what am I doing that is eliciting that kind of a response, that kind of a reflection to me?” Not in a blame way, but in a really curious, “I want to know what I’m doing so that I know what to not do, and how to change it.”

And it’s amazing to me how many things one person can do in one day that they have no clue what they’re doing. I mean, I was shocked at how many things I can do in one day that are just mindless; that are so not in harmony with what I want to be doing, or what I want to be aware of or... even being... I’ve had a few times where I was aware that I was actually being present - which was amazing - and it really does make a difference. Because if you’re interacting with somebody else and they’re over here, and you’re over here, and what’s going on between you, it’s not such a big deal because you’re not... I wasn’t... I could see that I’m not defensive; I’m not trying to be right; I’m not trying to convince them of anything. I’m able to listen and be okay with what they’re doing or what they’re saying, even how they are saying it. That’s few and far between, those moments.

GROUP: (Laughs)

MARY: I mean, I’ve had a few of them and I’m really grateful that at least I have had them so I can... I know what they are and I know what to look for, and what that means. Being that all the time is, yeah, I’m pretty far from that right now and I have a ways to go, but I’m trying with it and I think I’m getting better. I’m getting definitely better at recognizing feelings and recognizing what those feelings mean. But I’m still pretty clueless on how to express them. I’m hoping that Elias is going to talk about that today, (Everyone Laughing) because I REALLY need some help on that one. It’s like, please talk about how to express these feelings, because I don’t know what to do.

I mean, you know, and it’s not always okay when you’re… I will use an example that happened with Rodney and his son. They came to do... his son came to do a session. We had invited them to stay for brunch and I was fine, got up in the morning fine, great mood, did the session, everything’s fine, made breakfast, everything’s great. We all sit down to have breakfast and this is such an example of how amazing and precise our bodies are with memory.

All of the sudden in the middle of breakfast I got this overwhelming feeling. I mean, it came on so sudden. It was so overwhelming I actually had to get up and leave the table for a minute. It was not angry, it wasn’t sad, it wasn’t anxious. It was agitated. I felt like somebody threw me in a washing machine, and I was just really agitated (Laughing) and I had no clue why.

Okay. This was the same day as our failed webinar. (Laughs)

GROUP: (Laughing)

MARY: This was that morning, okay? And it just kept building and I kept trying to push it down and say to myself, because I didn’t know what it was about; I could not figure it out. So I kept thinking: “I’ll deal with it later. I’ll deal with it later. I’ll figure it out later; I have things I have to do today, and, you know, we’ll put this over here and I’ll get to it after.”

And the day started rolling, and it started to get time for the webinar, and it just kept building and building and building, and I was getting more and more and more agitated. And then it moved from being agitated to being frustrated and angry. I was angry at myself that I couldn’t make it go away and I couldn’t stop it. And I didn’t know what to do with it. And I didn’t know what it was from.

And that led into, you know, trying to connect with the webinar, which absolutely was not going to happen; it just didn’t happen. And then getting REALLY frustrated and really angry at myself because then I’m like, “Oh, great. Now I’m disappointing all these people, and this is my fault and what is the matter with me?” And it kept up all day long. I went to bed that night, I was just... Forget it; I give up.

The next day the feeling went away, but I was just consumed with trying to figure out what the heck happened. It took me four days. I didn’t figure it out until the next Thursday and my daughter had asked me in the morning what my agenda was for that day, or whatever, and I don’t know... I think I gave her a one sentence answer, or something. And she said something like, you know, “Are you okay?"

And I said, "NO! I’M NOT OKAY AND I DON’T KNOW WHY, SO DON’T ASK ME BECAUSE I CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT BECAUSE I HAVEN’T GOT A CLUE IN HELL WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME! SOMETHING IS WRONG AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS!" And I said, "I feel like there’s this feeling like right here and then there’s something else over here that it connects to, but I don’t know what it is." And I go, "AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT STARTED IT!" And I said, "Something triggered me and I haven’t got a clue what it was!"

And she was like, "And when did it start?"

And I go, "Sunday."

She was like, "When?"

And I said, "Sunday morning. It started Sunday morning."

And she was like, "Well maybe it started the day before, and you just didn’t realize because you went out shopping with Allie."

I was like, "I had a great time with Allie!" (Laughs) I said, "It was great! No, I know when it started! It started on Sunday." While I was saying that I remembered when I said, "No, I know the minute it started."

And she was like, "When?"

And I said, "It started during breakfast." And I said, "It started because we were all having a conversation about nothing." It really was about nothing. And Allison tried to enter the conversation and she got talked over, and I got triggered. And I had no clue.

But the amazing piece was, I mean down to the details, okay. We were sitting around the table. Ben was at the other end of the table. I was at the front end of the table, Alison was sitting next to me on the side, and it was Sunday morning and we were having brunch.

My whole life while I was growing up, every single Sunday we went to church. Every Sunday morning we came home and we had Sunday brunch. My father sat at the end of the table and I sat in the seat that Alison was in.

MALE: Wow.

MARY: That was my chair.

FEMALE: Wow.

MARY: And if you spoke, my dad would be just [talking away] you know, at Sunday brunch. But if one of us -one of the kids - spoke, he would put his fork down and he would stare at you, and he would say, "Was I speaking to you? Was anyone speaking to you? SHUT UP! If you make another sound..." Not talking! If you BREATHE too hard; if you made another sound, what would go down, he would stand up, he would look at you and he would say, "Get up, put your napkin down, excuse yourself, march yourself to your room and you will stay there until tomorrow morning."

Now mind you, we were raised Irish Catholics, okay? Friday was fish day. As a child I hated fish, okay? So I wasn’t eating very much on Friday. Saturday you were supposed to fast, and they made children fast also until Sunday morning AFTER church. You were not allowed to eat until Sunday morning AFTER church. So if you got sent to your room on Sunday morning during breakfast, you hadn’t eaten the whole day before and then you weren’t going to eat all day until the next day. It was rough.

That came FLOODING back to me when Donnalie was talking to me. I was sobbing and really upset. What’s fascinating, though, is as soon as I connected the feeling with the event, it all went away.

MALE: Wow.

MARY: And I’m talking about it now and I’m not shaking and I’m not crying. And I was shaking and crying. But that’s an example of the household that I was in. That’s a mild, mild, example of the household that I was in, in which you were not allowed to express yourself AT ALL.

MALE: No.

MARY: Nothing. Our family dog (Laughs) got better treatment than how the children did. Because at least the dog didn’t get beat up. So it’s, you know, when you are taught and it’s so ingrained in you to... Anything, any agitation at all around you is your signal: Shut up and be invisible.

And even to this day at sixty­one years old, I still have that reaction to shut up and be invisible. If somebody else is upset, do nothing. Pretend you don’t exist and then it will stop and it will go away. And maybe you’ll be safe; maybe you’ll be okay. That’s how I realized: Oh my god, there are a lot of things that are really scary that I never felt before, because I just learned how to turn it all off. And there’s a lot of scary things of interacting with people when it comes to feelings. And so that’s my lesson.

GROUP: (Laughing)

MARY: And part of that... part of the reason that I was sharing it with you guys, too, is because I’ve also realized that this is a piece that has also been ingrained in me: Be private, be private, be private. Never share yourself with anybody.

And I think that’s wrong. I think it’s important to share ourselves with other people and let them know who we are and what we think and what we feel and what we experience, because I think we experience a lot of similar things.

And we don’t know that we do, because we don’t talk about it. And we don’t share with other people. And I think I feel we’re connected to all of you and to people when I stop shutting up and when I do let myself share. So thank you for the opportunity to share.

GROUP: (Applause)

(Total time: 51 minutes)

Copyright 2015 Mary Ennis, All Rights Reserved.