Do you hear voices in your head that hold you back? Is The Gremlin of fear hissing, “You’ll never amount to anything!” or, “When are you gonna learn that ugly girls can’t do things like that?” or, “You’re not smart/pretty/talented/sexy/rich/wise enough!” when you start dreaming big?

Or maybe The Gremlin is spewing “You’ll never belong!” or, “What makes you think anybody would ever care about a book you would write?” or, “Get over yourself and know your place!” or, “Nobody will ever love you.”

So often, those voices stem from childhood. The Gremlin is just repeating things we heard from our parents or things we told ourselves when we were very young and impressionable.

And yet, those voices are powerful forces in our lives, and we may mistake them as truth, when they’re just bitter toxic lies spitting out of our minds like ammunition aimed at the jugular.

Joy…Noel…Peace…Believe: the clichés of Christmas. They’re dangling between the boughs of your tree, embossed in bold calligraphy on the Christmas cards, and possibly blinking in your front window like a spiritual Bud-Light bar sign. Words we display in gold sparkle across the fireplace before we re-box them for another 11 months. The implications of these words…the implications are something else.

When I launched Owning Pink a year and a half ago, my goal was to stay true to my authentic self, even as I revealed more and more of myself publicly. Many times, when writing a post -- and later, writing What’s Up Down There? -- I questioned how much to reveal. Where do you draw the line between being authentic and just TMI? I’ve been known to tweet on Twitter about signing off so I can go get lucky with my hubby. I’ve written openly in my blog and my book about the HPV that led me to have a procedure on my cervix meant to ward off cervical cancer. I’m featured in Redbook magazine this month discussing the sexual dysfunction that contributed to the demise of my first marriage. In my book, I confess to the elective C-section I had, the one I lied to everyone about when it happened four years ago. I write openly about the ambivalent feelings I had as a new mother.

So why am I doing this? Don’t I have any sense of modesty? Don’t I have secrets I’d prefer to keep to myself? Is nothing sacred? Does the world really need to know every little detail of my life? Aren’t there people I should protect? Do I really want to be ALL ME, ALL THE TIME? These are great questions -- ones I wind up asking myself all the time.