in other news

Well now.
I wrote that yesterday poem at work. Which means something.
Those months ago I got that thing that went "poetry won't come back to me till I'm done with this, whatever the hell this is." In part because of the situations and moods in which I unexpectedly remember bits of it with great feeling, I've become increasingly convinced that it was one of those prophecy dealies.
Poetry has come back to me; therefore I am done with "this". The this in question was almost certainly one of those initiation-via-sneakiness-of-universe deals. You know, personality changes that you can't know you're working on or else it wouldn't gel properly. Or something. In my made-up space language the way of describing it is to say I'm an air mage who completed her journeyman's work in earth magic. And since everything that passes through the manifest universe partakes of all elements, in order to do this I had to get above my remedial level in fire magic and resolve some of the problems I'd been having with water magic.
As to how it can be told in something other than my made-up space language, well, that might take some time. You know how the symbol set you're using in large part determines which aspects of reality you have the power to describe? That's the whole reason for making up crazy terminologies in the first place. To enable the terminology-user to pay attention.

[intermission]

Taking care of yourself, changing your outward demeanor and the way people treat you, being a leader, displaying confidence. Every now and then Bossman will have a little pep talk with me about this--more like a pep talk than traditional advice-giving, anyway. He's certainly more encouraging than Dad! Just like we did just now. I even said to him, look, the actual practice of being a leader, of doing the things, I have no problem with. It's being seen to be a leader, to have confidence and things like that, even when I just think about it I get all locked up. Some people are afraid of heights or small spaces, I'm afraid of that. And he said something like, But this is good, this gives me great confidence in you. This fear you are feeling comes from some insecurity, which means you have really considered the subject and aren't just being cocksure. If you didn't have that fear I would be worried.
And he said I should watch Devil Wears Prada; he knows the lady whose life it's based on. She is, he said, an extreme example of the kind of thing he's talking about, but she is extremely successful because of her mastery of that world and the way of presenting oneself that is necessary to succeed in that world.

Grr. So helpful to be interrupted. Now I know exactly what my next thing on my to-do list is, and as always, it makes me angry. The grumpy pouty kind of angry, not anything more sinister. Hell, Dave's been preaching this line to me for months--years!. And I've still got that irrational fear.

You hide something your entire life, you build whole areas of your identity around the assumptions necessary for keeping it hidden, keeping hidden even the processes by which you went about hiding it. However you get from burying it in a steel bunker guarded by shark ninjas in a cave under a mountain at the bottom of the sea, to nailing it up over your front door, it is bound to be long, painful and exceedingly embarassing.