On The Me I Am When I Think No One is Watching

I have confessed before that my car is my safe place to dance unabashedly, sing at the top of my lungs, talk to myself, etc. It's that way because I'm pretty sure that no one is gonna show up in there with me unannounced. AND... for the most part everyone keeps to themselves inside a vehicle. For whatever reason I don't really worry about embarrassing myself for a millisecond passing people I don't know on the road.

At lunch today my children were embarrassed for me. I wasn't actually embarrassed.  The waiter approached our table while I was doing an impression of a demented chicken-like bird that I dreamed about last night. He actually approached two separate times and both times I was doing that impression. The children laughed so hard they were struggling to breathe. I would have happily shared my dream about the demented chicken-like birds with the waiter. I was being serious. The children apparently would never dream of appearing silly in front of strangers.

When I am at home alone, my entire house is a place that feels much like my car. I'm pretty free. It's not as contained as my car. I know on occasion that neighbors must hear me singing and being crazy and wonder if they should call for a straight jacket. They haven't, though, so that's good. That may explain, however, why they look at me odd sometimes.

When I am not home alone, there are two places that are somewhat safe for me to live very free. One of those is the kitchen. For the most part I can hear people coming if I'm not playing music too loud or have in my earphones. The safest of places to be crazy when people are home is definitely the basement. Well... today when we got home from lunch I went to the basement, earphones in, to finish folding a load of laundry. I had a decent sense of where everyone else was in the house .....so I thought.  Laundry folding generally takes me about three times as long as it should because that is my favorite place to dance and sing. I take frequent dance breaks. When I do that I go around the corner to the back part of the basement. Today I was dancing like a fool and I turned around to come back to my folding table and Hubby Guy was standing there stunned with tears of laughter threatening to spill out of his eyes. I was busted. I confessed to him that I act that way regularly in the basement. It was a fun moment because he feigned mortification. He thought it was great, though, I could tell.

I long for a time and a community where I can be fully me without being concerned about what people might think.