Vulnerability

So I don't think it's a very big secret that I love Glee. As in it's not a secret at all. So it probably shouldn't be a surprise that I started watching The Glee Project, and that I love it... In case you don't know your Glee spin-offs, The Glee Project is a Ryan Murphy endorsed reality tv show in which the prize is a 7 episode run on Glee next (this) season. Each week has a theme, a "homework" assignment (aka a pre-challenge challenge), and a music video challenge. They narrow it down to a bottom 3 and then those three go and perform a final audition for Ryan Murphy (and the casting director and the choreographer). Week one the theme was individuality, week two was theatricality, and week three was vulnerability. And that's as far as I've watched currently... and yes I did stop watching just so I could blog about it... and because it's 3:30 AM.

For the vulnerability episode, the music video they did was very similar to the "Born This Way" episode of Glee. They all had to write a word or short phrase on a board that was the thing they were most vulnerable about and walk through a crowded courtyard. And honestly I liked this episode of The Glee Project a lot more than I did the Glee episode with the same theme... it definitely made me think a lot more than the Glee version did...

What word would I write?

I went through a lot of ideas... I've changed a lot in the past six months, but in some ways I've changed back to parts of who I used to be... I read somewhere recently that when someone as integral to your life as your spouse (or child) dies it's not even that you have to figure out who you are as much as you have to reinvent yourself. You kinda have to just start back over to when you figured out who you were and go from there. And I see some of that in myself... because when I first asked myself what word I would write I went to high school. High school me would have written something like "misfit" or "human dictionary" or "undateable." And then I realized that I'm an adult now... my 10 year reunion is a couple of weeks from now... and I'm not that person anymore... but I read Nathan's poems from last year... and while he was admittedly biased towards the positive/gushing, I'm not sure I'm that girl anymore, either. I don't know how I could be, after going through his death... and that's when I realized what I would write on the sign.

Widow

I've learned how to make jokes so it doesn't hurt so bad. I've learned how to distract myself from the hard days, and I try so hard to disassociate myself from the label, or to make it this not big deal thing, cause it's hard when people look at me and I become this reminder of grief... But it is a big deal. It's a big deal every flipping day that I wake up without the person I thought I would be with till I was 105 and it's a really hard dichotomy to live in... because I don't want to be defined by the word widow... and yet everything about me has been redefined by becoming one. And I don't want anyone else to label me as "the widow," but I write blogs upon blogs about dealing with the death of my husband, and talking about what life is like now and on the bad days that's what I see myself as and that scares me... It scares me that I could become a sort of "has-been" in the game of life, and that the best it's gonna get is already gone. It scares me that this could get in the way of future relationships- that it could be scare someone off or be something that they can't get past. Or that it will make the right person feel insecure or unsure of me.

Nathan said:
There is no question
Of her strengths or character
She knows who she is

But I'm not sure that I do anymore... and that lays squarely at the feet of becoming a widow. And with that comes a great deal of vulnerability, because I don't know how to be a widow without it consuming me. I don't know how to be who I am.