Let me tell you a secret. There is no perfect story.

There was a time when I was caught up in the meaning of words and how to perfectly frame them like so many jewels. Microscopic precision stifled my voice, crushed into great vaults of silence.

“Your words have meaning.” … “It helps me to read what you say.” … “I want to read more!” Such passing thoughts were spoken into the muffling bindings between my ears and my heart. The sounds fade softly into the darkness, no matter how much I love the light through the cracks they open.

“I’ve written and hidden twenty books-worth of words, my dear, and maybe more!” Today I whisper these secrets, and the sound feels louder than an explosion, cracking the glass where I measure time in a thin stream of what-I-don’t-yet-deserve.

I wonder who I believe. Is there a perfect story?

I told myself to stay silent ten years ago, or perhaps twenty. Still, early on I had grades lined up on pages that claimed I knew my way around words more than anything. An admired teacher told me he graded my journals more harshly because I had the capacity to write well. I still remember how thankful I felt to see those red marks after that discussion.

Then I blogged and wrote my way through forgotten years, awash in spilled red ink of depression and abuse. Some of those pages are tangible, still stored away in sealed boxes I fear to open lest the zombie emotions rise up and consume me even now that I’m alive again. When I try to read them I realize how many lies I poured into every one. Lies that could erode the pages of my life only because I believed.

When did I stop letting myself be controlled by the idea of acceptance on others’ terms? How?

My questions muffle objections and storm on through the barricades set up to keep them confined. I can’t contain them in structures, border them with bands of gold and silver, and make them behave like good little children. The child I never was.

Perfection was possible only in others’ imaginations. And I held on for dear life to the confining image projected at me. I wanted their love, and they wouldn’t share it with a verbal rebel who spouted questions and ideas like so many get-out-of-jail-free passes.

Can it be an imperfect story?

Such questions objected to bars, borders, and frames. They shook my foundations and crumbled the armor I’d built to contain who I am. They exposed how often I lied in repeating foreign assessments of who I might be. In breaking loose, they broke me free from the hourglass measure of what I’m allowed to love, to see.

Now I can’t predict what will pour from within. I hold out my hands and phrases stream through my fingertips like so many discoveries waiting to be seen. I can’t hold them all or keep them inside. They pile up, wave upon wave. I’m trying not to fall behind.

Words fill my mind and my time like so many thousands of grains of sand, pouring through every connection, beyond my capacity to expand. And still I don’t know the answers, only the love that surges through the exploration.

There is no perfect story. There is only this moment of realization and how it contrasts to all the tick-tock silences that came before.

And if your limits break open in this intersection of paragraphs,… then watch the grains of unending possibility pour through those gaps and smile.

This perfect moment is your story, too. They all are.