Hello

 Well I guess I've been gone for a long time. Where was I, you ask? I was nowhere, not even in ninaland. Sometimes I disappear from myself, that's the only way I can explain it. I guess I don't have to explain anything but I missed this. I missed me, and although I don't know you all, I missed you looking at me through the window of this blog.I want to be true to myself, I always have, and be somewhat true to you. I say somewhat because let's be honest, this is a public forum, I do not intend on stripping emotionally naked in front of you. That is something I do with my therapist and maybe with a good friend or two. However, I'd like to give you a striptease.Maybe I was lost for the last while and a half and maybe I'll never be found or I'll never find it. What is it, anyways?So I'm reacquainting myself with writing in this forum, actually in any forum since I haven't been writing much at all. I don't know if I feel totally myself when I am not writing, and I don't know if I feel totally myself when I am writing. I'm not sure I know what it means to feel like myself. Or to be myself. I guess to know how to just be, and that's what I would like to convey in my writing sometimes, just being.I have always considered being more important than doing.We live in a society that emphasizes doing. But really, what are you doing that's so important? Maybe you are a doctor and you are saving lives, but another doctor could do that. What makes you special? Who are you when you are saving lives? Who are you when you are not saving lives? Who are we in the hurricane, who are we in the calm?Who am I in the age of Trump? When history records this, can I say that I resisted, that I spoke against intolerance and hate? Can I say maybe I wouldn't know what I was made of if I didn't have something to resist? Not that bad things are welcome in my life, but if they are going to come regardless, I might as well decide who I am going to be in relation to everything that is happening around me."I am that I am." That is a quote from the Bible I think. What I am is the most important thing in my life and the one thing that keeps changing. I can't get a handle on who I am. I guess I'm just a person, trying to survive. I'd like to think I'm more than that, and many times I am, but what I am consistently is someone who can survive. I've survived quite a bit of turmoil, as maybe you have as well.But I keep wondering why we think life is a fight. That we are supposed to keep fighting.I'm starting to think that life is not a fight. It's not inherently emotionally or physically violent. Life is just that, what we make of it. Standing by itself it is what it is. We provide meaning for it.I want my life to mean something special. I want it to mean that I loved and left a message of love to the world.I hope this is the beginning of my message.nina