This past Friday I wrote a post titled “She told me to stay single.” The post is a real life account of a woman I met this year that kindly told me to stay single. She wanted me to counter the narrative of how she was raised as a Latin woman (and how all women are raised directly and indirectly). Since meeting that woman, her face and her words have woven in and out of my mind.

I’m currently in a personal conversation on marriage and relationships with the Universe. I don’t feel like I can have honest conversations with my married friends on relationships because I feel they will want to market marriage, as society markets it since we were kids. In other cases, I feel people want to talk about marriage in a way that is safe and will uphold the story they tell themselves. I can’t talk to my single friends about marriage, because they are single and have not walked in the shoes of marriage. I have gone as far as taking conscious dating and relationship classes, that have opened my eyes to new ways of thinking and is shaping my views of relationships. I’m starting to understand the psychology behind it, which is nice but also hard to swallow.

To be an adult is to live in confusion. Life is dynamic and constantly changing. The rules of dating and marriage are changing, but how we market it has not changed.

My post from last week took only a few hours to write, but it took me weeks to get the courage to write it. Each time I tried to refrain from writing that piece, my mother, sister, best friend and close friend all told me to write anyway. Why the fear? I’m walking on a minefield of a delicate subject(s) that is few talk about candidly. I want to avoid the topic, but the topic is pulling me and at the same time I feel guided by the universe to write out my curiosity.

I have learned and grown, these past three years, as a result of having a good relationship with my voice and nurturing it. Writing vulnerably has helped me as improvisor. I realized a few weeks ago that my fear on stage and in life, is a manageable veil. It’s no longer a wall or a cage. While I fear speaking absolute truth, what keeps me going is my curiosity and the thought that I can expand someones perspective that can lead to their own happiness and true freedom that we all had as kids.

This journey will help me find an even deeper level of strength then the strength that I have come to know on this journey.

Love – Stephanie XO