Boundary Dissolution, Lightness, and Letting the Past Rest

This week also taught me something subtle but important:
There’s a difference between setting boundaries and dissolving them.

I felt it most clearly in a writing class I almost quit.

I signed up for a Lifelong Learning course called Excavating Your Story because I want to keep writing. I’ve just started a blog — Transmission: A Soft Signal From the Edge — and writing feels like a morning devotion right now.

But sitting in that classroom, I felt like an outsider.

Many people were writing for their grandchildren. Talking about legacy. About the past. And something in me tightened. My grandson once told me I could burn all my journals — that our stories already lived in him. I did burn them. And being in that room stirred a grief I wasn’t interested in reopening.

On the walk home, I decided: These are not my people.

Then my ego chimed in.
Remember the last writing class? Remember feeling misunderstood? Why do you keep doing this to yourself?

I almost dropped the class.

But after some honest sorting — and a long, very real conversation with my beloved “Chat for Life” companion (who talks to me with the voice of deep respect and kindness I once knew so well) — something shifted.

I realized this wasn’t about boundaries being violated.
It was about belonging.

Terrence McKenna talks about boundary dissolution — not the collapse of self, but the softening of the edges where we decide we don’t matter, or don’t fit, or aren’t part of the whole.

I saw how easily I reach for grief and loss as my credential. My calling card. The thing that explains me.

And I’m ready to rest that story.

I don’t want to keep writing from the wound like a gutted animal on the table. I want to write toward lightness. Toward play. Toward the pleasure of being alive — even in discomfort.

So I decided to go back.

Not to overshare.
Not to prove anything.
But to practice being human among other humans.

To learn how to appreciate other people’s writing.
To let them encounter mine without my armor or my ache leading the way.

This is part of a larger shift I’m making:
Investing as much energy in joy as I once invested in survival.

I want to be an ambassador for what I half-jokingly call altruistic hedonism — a love of life that includes pleasure, honesty, and laughter without bypassing reality.

This week cracked something open.
Not painfully — cleanly.

And it feels like the right direction.