Sometimes I go to speak…. And it’s like every organ in my body has shut down. The ones that help me to breathe, dilute, process. It’s like a clamp is on my throat. It’s like my brain has been wiped clear. Sometimes I go to speak, and everything I am so passionate about is crowding on the other side of a thin curtain , but I cannot push the curtain aside to share my bounty of knowledge . Sometimes I go to speak and someone has turned the power-off button on my body. All that glorious, lived, authentic knowledge that I have culled over a lifetime is sitting there in my powered-off body, with no way to be communicated to those around me. Sometimes I go to speak and someone has turned all the bright lights on. They are blinding me and I am stunned into silence. Sometimes I go to speak and my soul remembers how it was born into silencing. Every bright, beautiful, true thought that I formulated was crushed in the fabricated ether of conformity to strict dogma. ...