Post-Festival Rambling

Do you remember when I said I was going to update more regularly? About that.

But deferred projects aside, here I am. Writing. There's a sacred vow to uphold.

(Sacred vow? Really? About blogging? More on that later.)

Heartland Pagan Festival 2016 is over, and I think I have learned some things. Hopefully I will figure out what they are eventually, and then be able to comment on them more in depth. At the moment I am still trying to sort it out in a process strangely akin to determining the source and type of an injury. Poke, poke. It hurts there. Poke. There, too.

The problem is that none of the things I am learning from this process are glamorous or particularly interesting. They are mostly confirmations of things I've known about myself and struggled to ignore for a very long time.

Item: I don't do well when people aren't paying attention to me, when I am not the center of focus, when I am not indispensable and revered.

It's tough to admit that. Wanting is ugly. Wanting is weakness. Wanting, synonyms: deficient, inadequate, lacking, insufficient, imperfect, unacceptable, unsatisfactory, flawed, faulty, defective, unsound, substandard, inferior, second-rate, poor, shoddy.

(No, you're equivocating.)

The terrible irony of being codependent is that when I am not important to a process I despise myself and everyone, and when people do rely on me I feel trapped and powerless.

So if I had been able to contribute anything meaningful to the festival this year, if I'd had ritual roles or really anything had been required of me that put me in the center of things, I would probably be whining about that.

Is this one of those things where the final conclusion will be "I am just an unhappy person?"

Poke, poke. Yeah, that stings.