 I'm so grateful and excited to be invited to present alongside the other people today. For me, I don't know about for you, but for me it's been both fascinating and heart touching, and that's so cool. I participated in the Float On Writers Program since the fall of 2014, and after each float I wrote a creative non-fiction piece, and this is the latest one. It's called The Consequences of Floating, one. The first little while is always about coming back into my body, becoming un-num, breath and heartbeat, water lapping against skin, the muffled roar of the inside of my head. Eventually my consciousness expands beyond close boundaries to include the rumble of a truck passing on the street, a fellow floater bumping in their tank. Then the unwork begins. Time passes, barely acknowledged. When I step out, my body fits me better, or perhaps I fit better into my body, taut skin and soothed muscles with as much coordination as a new colt, pleasantly fuzzed without the hangover headache, my mind is a lazily churning eddy in a clear, warm stream, too. After several risings and sinkings of consciousness, abrupt awareness that my knees and shoulders are still bound up, do they ever fully relax? Now I catch myself tensing my left knee when it has nothing to do while I'm driving or sitting in bed, lounging with friends on a bar-side patio. And all day my shoulders knit themselves into knots, frozen in a half shrug. It takes conscious effort to reseat them, and when I check back half an hour later, they've migrated back upwards again, three, let go. It's the first thing I center on when I'm in the tank and my new mantra outside it. I breathe it into my muscles, whisper it silently when I'm afraid someone will feel angry or think less of me if I tell them my truth. Or when I feel the internal fires of jealousy, anger, shame. Instead of trying to bind, dismiss, or bury what disturbs me, I want to let go of the barriers separating me from my experience, me from myself. I want to let it come. I want to remember to forget to put up the walls for. I am a tightly clenched fist, so tightly clenched and for so long it's painful to open, not a release, a prying apart, rusted metal squealing. I want this, and yet I am terrified. If I let go, what will keep me from flying apart? My atoms, forgetting their purpose, will rush out with eager curiosity to explore the corners of the universe. If I let go, I cease to be what I am. Five. When all the emotions pile on top of me and I can't breathe, or I'm lying in my bed, my body rigid with worries, I imagine I'm in a float tank, immediate the sense of relief. In external space internalized, I carry with me a source of calm, lying in the warm dark, merged with water. I imagine leather and metal braces covering my body. I've worn them since childhood. I made them myself, thinking they'd keep me safe and stable. Instead they limit my movement and chafe me raw. One by one I unbuckle them and let them float away. Unbound. And it occurs to me now that I am unbounded too, without boundaries, limitless. I do not know what the consequences will be. I recognize only the possibility of becoming. Thanks for listening.