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September 21, 2002 - Jericho   Deep breaths, before I go under. And it's not a bad thing. I don't mean to make it sound that way, like the way I used to talk about how work made me feel. But: everything is about to change for me - us - and I want to breathe in a little of this Now to hold on to, before this life becomes The Rest Of My Life. Earlier this week, made the unforgivable mistake of looking in on Ope-Rah for a few. This woman is a smart woman, and her heart is always in the right place, but I think that she is dangerous and she never fails to upset me. Her guests this hour were a pack of ladies, headed by no less an authority than Nayomee Wulfe, carrying on and on about how motherhood had destroyed their lives because no one had ever set them wise that it wasn't all sugar and spice and pink cotton candy. I don't even know who I am anymore, one woman intoned in a dead voice as the camera panned a shot of her kid scampering around. And I thought, huh. Will that be me in a few years? Will I not know who I am? Maybe, before all this comes down on my head, I better take a minute and think about who I am right now.   And I sat. And I thought. And I tell you true - I don't have the foggiest idea "who I am" right now, and I don't give a great God damn about it. For most of the past ten years, I let myself be defined exclusively by what I was not. Not happy, not free, not at peace. I didn't have the strength in me to take any shape except the one made by the walls around me. Those walls are gone now - gone, every single one of them - and I haven't felt any need to put up new ones to mark where the world ends and I begin. Or like this, maybe - space and no gravity and no need for Up or Down to be any direction in particular. Who am I? I am content and happy and free and beyond that there's almost nothing I can say about it. Despair and anger are easy to describe. Joy and freedom come without words.   And what happens now? If content and happy and free is what I am, do I carry in my body the seeds of my own destruction? Am I bringing into my world not one child but four more walls so much stronger and higher than the ones that stood before? Am I making a box for myself - so narrow a space! - that for the rest of my life will mark where I end and the world begins? Time will tell. But I think the answer to this is No, and I think I need a better metaphor than walls. I'm through with them.