Word up.

A little less than a month ago, my beloved grandmother died. It is still like a stab wound to the heart to type that.

But this post isn't about my grief. Or my loss. Or even about my grandma. Despite my self-proclaimed prolificness as a writer (and, in the case of prolificness, a word maker-upper), even I don't think I can do justice to the person my grandma was and the impact she had on my life. There aren't enough superlatives in the English language. And since my HTML class over the last few months proved I have no prolificness for foreign languages, suffice it to say that the words adequate enough to describe my grandma just plain don't exist.

Yesterday, I had 2 1/2 hours of uninterrupted driving time to think. And, as is the case lately, when I have time to think, my thoughts turn to my grandma. I've had many occasions like that lately, and yesterday I found myself thinking of the things people said about her at her visitation, and during the funeral -- thinking of the words people used to describe her.

And as the radio scanned through the stations (because when I'm in the car by myself, I scan the radio, an auditory A.D.D. if you will), I contemplated the words I thought people would use to describe me when I died.

But then, more importantly, I contemplated the words I wanted people to use to describe me when I died. What did I need to do as a person to first make sure people actually cared enough to show up at my funeral, and second to make sure that the words they used were words I wanted them to use?

Clearly, I shouldn't be able to be by myself for uninterrupted stretches of time.

Given my proficiency for boiling down complicated things to their simplest form (read: laziness), I decided that taking on all of those words at once was a guaranteed set up for failure, and that given my rapidly advancing age, I needed to boil it down to one word in order to have any hope of getting it done on time.

One word.

One word that encapsulated everything I wanted to be.

One word that carried enough meaning to be unambiguous, enough importance to not be trite.

One word that overruled the non-absoluteness of words.

One word.

Around Okemos, I decided what that word was:

(drumroll)

fearless.

Not like bungee-jumping-off-the-Stratosphere, or driving-100-miles-an-hour-on-M6-while-blindfolded fearless. More like willing-to-try-anything-within-reason fearless. Or emotionally-unscared-enough-to-open-myself-up-to-things-that-used-to-scare-me fearless. Tear-down-the-walls-that-hold-me-back fearless. Trust-first fearless. Not-afraid-to-love-myself-first fearless. Justice-for-all fearless.

That kind of fearless.

At a very delicate young age, I had a bestie. He lived next door to me. We did everything together. He had a rockin' sandbox in his backyard that was the hit of all of the neighborhood kids. Plus, unlike the sandbox in my backyard, his didn't have cat poop in it. Many a summer afternoon was spent with the neighborhood kids, playing in the sandbox. One day, one of the girls who I thought was my friend told me my mom was calling me from next door. I went home, only to find out that my mom, in fact, didn't need me at home, and furthermore, didn't call me home. I went back outside to find all of the kids in the sandbox hiding behind the pine tree, and laughing at me for being stupid enough to fall for that trick. All. Of. The. Kids. Including my bestie.

That was the day the first wall went up.

The impact on me of what I'm sure to them was a stupid prank cannot be understated, because it defined who I was for the rest of my life. Yes. The. Rest. Of. My. Life. To this day, if I'm in front of a group of people in the mall and they start laughing, I instantly feel self-conscious, sure they're laughing at me. To this day, I can't trust my bestie wholly and completely, because my old bestie joined in on mocking me.

In elementary school, I tried so hard to fit in. I didn't have the right clothes, the right older siblings, the right degree of stupidity to fit in. I was ostracized for being smart. I remember a classmate telling me once that "People don't like you because you're smarter than they are."

That was the day the second wall went up.

The last six years of my life, I listened to the person who criticized and critiqued every aspect of my personality - who told me that although I was smart, people didn't like me. I was hard to get along with. I didn't do the right thing, or say the right thing, or wear the right thing. I did this wrong, I did that wrong, I was wrong about everything. One day, she told me, "You have a lot of potential, and you're very smart, people just don't like you."

That's the day the third wall went up.

Ever since I was a little girl, I have been afraid of myself, consumed by self-doubt, ruled by the opinions of others. I have let other people rent space in my head.

It is time to let them go. It is time to take control. It is time to decide that I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and darn it, people like me.

It's the first step to realizing fearless.

Because once the self-doubt is gone, once I understand that other people's negative opinions of me are really just that - opinions, and most are really more a manifestation of their own insecurities and self-doubts, I can build up the courage to do what I should be, create the faith that I can be what I want to be.

I can be fearless.

When I can decide that regardless of how I have been treated in the past, people deserve trust first, and a wall if and only when they do something to break that trust, I can be fearless.

When I decide that regardless of how I have been treated in the past, I am a person worthy of love and devotion regardless of what I'm wearing, what I believe in, or because I can kick your ass at Jeopardy, I can be fearless.

When I can decide that regardless of how I have treated myself in the past, I have to love myself first, give myself some slack, and understand that the only hurdles in life I have to climb were put there by me, I can be fearless.

When I can decide that regardless of how I have been treated in the past, the walls I have built are keeping out the good people as well as the bad people, and I deserve the good people in my life.

When I can decide that regardless of how I have been treated in the past, emotionally closed off and unavailable is no way to foster productive, meaningful, and honest relationships, and I deserve those too.

When I have achieved that zen-like level, free of self-doubt, immune to the opinions of others, and only have loving, supportive, and caring people signing leases in my head, I can go after everything I have always wanted but been too afraid of failure to chase.

I can be fearless.