A friend of mine told me yesterday that I sometimes made her nervous. Really, I wondered, I think I’m just a big creampuff. Yes, she said, sometimes you are, but you are a Scary Creampuff. I guess I know that, I know I made a lot of people nervous, I know I can be scary. I only know this because people  tell me.

There are, in fact, a number of things I can be scary about. I am scary when people say they want me to be honest but can’t handle it when I am. I am scary when people treat me without respect or dignity. I am scary when I talk about things people don’t want to talk about. I am scary when people are cruel to other people, or when they use the love of animals to hurt people. I am scary about people who forget that we do not need to hate the people we disagree with, or argue with them every time they think out loud. I am scary when people enjoy the virtues of a free society but are angry at people who think differently or demonize them.

I am definitely scary about the things Donald Trump is saying, and about the weak-minded people cheering him on. I care little for politics as it is now practiced in our country, I do not dwell on the left, or on the right, but I bleed a bit for my country when the people who presume to lead it are willing to let children risk suffering and death rather than annoy their donors.

I live an open life in the age of social media, and there is hardly a day when someone does not say something challenging to me, or to Maria about our lives or the way we treat our animals or the way we think. We do ask for it, of course, and we expect it. We can handle it, but still, it is constant test of patience, psychological stamina.

And most of all, of identity.

Today, watching Fate learn how to stand in her own kind of truth, seeing her  hold her ground against the imperious and difficult Zelda, I was resolved to stand my ground, to find my truth and stay in it. One person sent me a long list of books about training horses. I told her we were not looking for books about training horses, and Chloe is not my horse, but Maria’s.  I never intend to read a book about training horses.

A friend sent me some disturbingly angry messages because she does not like some of the things I have been writing lately, and I understood from the anger and cruelty of her messages that we can not be friends any longer. A sad thing, an increasingly common thing.

Several people analyzed the photos on the blog and had things to say about the way the saddle sits on Chloe. Maria shakes her head, she is learning the good and hard lessons of the open life in the age of social media. Every day, I learn about building boundaries and keeping them.

Fate has become an inspiration and a grounding point for me. I lied about many things for most of my life, especially about me. In the past few years I have confronted some of the ugly and painful truths about myself, I am learning every day to be authentic, and the Facebook era has been a great help to me. It has forced me to define and defend and articulate my identity.  And I always struggled with identity, as has Maria. We are building our truths together, every day.

That is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received, the challenge to define myself. Every time I make my own decisions, solve my own problems, make my own mistakes I rebuild and give rebirth to the identity that was shattered when I was so young. Everything is a gift, I think, every morning i watch our puppy learn to do the same thing, to use her powerful instincts and work ethos to figure out who she is, to define her identity and to stand up for it. I identify with this, this is something we share. Every day the sheep tell her she can’t get close, they won’t move, she is not strong enough, she doesn’t know what she is doing.

Every day she is proving them wrong. Every time she walks out into the pasture, she is learning who she is and why she is on the earth. Every day I post a message on my blog I am learning the same thing.

Dogs mirror us and our lives, of course.

So I accept the mantle of the Scary Creampuff. Fate is learning that identity does not come easily or cheaply. She goes to the lake and romps with children, then comes to the pasture and stares down a defiant ewe. Life itself. Identity is not free, it is not something others will accept or encourage, it comes from within, one hard step after another. Like a precious and rare flower, it must be forever protected and nourished and proclaimed, it is the very essence of the soul.