m y s e l f

I am feeling anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled, off.  And I can’t put my finger on why, or even really how. It’s like something has changed, shifted.
Or maybe it’s that nothing has really changed and that’s what I’m feeling.  Stuck, trapped, cornered, wary.  Not trusting myself, not trusting others.  Not trusting my own experiences.  Not trusting my ability to discern what is good for me.  Not trusting myself to take care of me, to stand up for me, to have my best interests in mind.
Or maybe it’s all of the gluten recently.
Or the loose ends.
The unsent email.
The crickets sneaking around my living room.
The nightmares to come.
The insecurities of old.
The relentless voices, the thoughts, the music, the screens.
The things and things and things.

Breathe.

How is it that I forget that?  How is it that I can forget an essential and automatic function? How am I so disconnected from my body?  How did I come to live so fully in my mind?

How do I learn to trust the journey? To enjoy the process?  How do I dig into things instead of running away? How do I ground myself in something that isn’t constantly shifting?  How do I find stability?

How can I trust myself when I betray myself again and again?  How do I heal from the wounds that define me?  Who am I without them?  How do I protect myself without being cynical and hardened?  How do I let people in without letting them destroy me?

How do I learn the things nobody has ever taught me?  How do I find the courage to do it all again and again and again? How do I believe that it’s worth it?

How do I find myself? Amidst everyone else, amidst the shoulds and the expectations, amidst the habits? How do I know what she likes, what she dreams, what she feels? How do I get her to know her when she keeps disappearing every time other people are around?  How will I recognize Myself?

Will I know her when I find her?

Am I Setting Myself Up for Failure?

(Before I overthink it and talk myself out of writing, here it goes:) 

I haven’t blogged in quite a while and I miss it.  I am not exactly sure what it is that I miss about it… I still keep a journal and write in that fairly regularly.  And I am still active on other social media platforms.  But it’s like blogging uses a different part of my brain or something… (I tried to delve more into why I think this is true but it just ended up a rambling mess that didn’t get me any closer to an actual reason so I deleted that part and am moving on… No reason to subject you to more of my ramblings than necessary. (Not that ANY of this is “necessary” per se… but, I digress…))  ANYWAY, regardless of why I miss blogging,  the point is that I do miss it and so what better day than the first of a new year to jump back in.

(Yikes, this feels like a bit of a rocky start… Let’s hope I get back into the groove soon…)

I have this really vivid memory of when I was a kid (meaning like….late elementary school maybe?) and I was sitting on the floor of my room and I was telling myself “if you want to be good at something, the best thing to do is to practice… so if you really do want to be a good writer than you need to keep practicing!” And I remember writing and writing and writing, hoping that it would someday pay off and I would be a good writer.  (Note: I also did this with learning how to juggle.  And other things of questionable value such as how to brush my teeth with my left hand in case some day I lost my right arm in a juggling accident. (just kidding about the juggling accident, but I am serious about trying to learn how to function ambidextrously.))  During all of this writing practice, I don’t remember what I actually wrote about, but I had the sense that it didn’t exactly matter.  What mattered was being able to organize my thoughts and get them onto paper and string together sentences and just, well… PRACTICE.  I know I wrote quite a few stories in my early years… One about cereal comes to mind.  And a “chapter-book” called Penpals Forever. (Maybe I’ll find a massively embarrassing excerpt of that one to share at some point.)  And then in my more angsty high school years I tended towards writing poetry.  I was never really a great poet… but I like rhyming, and I’d like to think that all of those dumb, angsty, rhyming poems helped me write the two children’s books I have out now.  (Not that my children’s books are dumb or angsty! But they certainly do rhyme!)

And so now here we are all of these years later and I am rambling about childhood stories on a blog that I haven’t updated in about a year and I haven’t even really gotten to the topics I was meaning to write about: yoga and new year’s resolutions.  Though I did also want to write about blogging and I have sort of done that so… yay for one out of three!

(How are we feeling about this colloquial writing style? I feel very out of practice… is this even my voice? Am I straying from the topic too much? Too many asides and rhetorical questions? Ah, well…that’s why this is going on this little blog anyway… because the stakes are just so dang low here and that’s what we all need, right?  A place where the stakes are so low that we can fail miserably and it doesn’t really impact much.)

So, given that it is a now January 1, 2020, I figured I would go ahead and make some plans/goals/resolutions for this new year.  There’s a whole bunch of stuff that happened in my life in 2019 and to be honest, I don’t think I’m quite ready to talk about it all online yet, but it has meant that there have been some changes in my life and long story short I moved away from Blacksburg, Virginia and am currently living in Annapolis, Maryland.  I miss Blacksburg and the pottery studio there and my friend Maddy and all of my babysitting kiddos and the freedom to work at home and have my own business… but I’m hoping that in the long run this was a good decision and a beneficial change.

I now sit at a desk full-time during the week and I must say, there are many days when I get home from work and all I want to do is lay on the couch with a beer and scroll through Twitter. I am trying to not make that a habit as I can already feel my muscles wasting away and my brain being unable to process strings of text longer 280 characters and my eyesight getting worse from staring at a computer screen all day, so… that brings us to resolution numero uno:

I am committing to do a 30-day at-home yoga challenge.  If you haven’t heard of Yoga with Adriene on YouTube I highly recommend checking out her channel because she is an amazingly wonderful human (from what I know of her on her yoga videos anyway) and she has so many great videos (and it’s all free!)  She does a lot of these 30-day yoga challenges and I did a majority of her “Dedicate” series last year and I fully intend to actually finish this one this year! I hopefully have two friends who will be doing it with me (remotely), but even if they back out I want to make it through all 30 days on my own (even if I don’t end up doing 30 consecutive days and it takes me until March!)  I am really awesome at starting things like this and not so awesome at following through… but I am hoping/committing/planning that this will be different.

And on the topic of New Year’s resolutions… what are your thoughts? Are they a waste of time because they so rarely last the whole year and we all lose steam and then beat ourselves up about it?  Or are they worth it only if you make smart, realistic, attainable goals?  Or are they always beneficial, even if you dream big, because at least it is an opportunity to reset and reevaluate and check in with yourself? (I wrote a post last year on my other site (www.themillsofabstraction.com) about resolutions and goals and it’s more organized than this one if you want to read that instead… I don’t know if I’d blame you as this feels like a chaotic mess in comparison!) 

I’ve had years and seasons of my life where I’ve felt each of these ways… and I think I am currently in the “realistic goals” part of the spectrum. And so instead of being like, “I want to cultivate a whole friend group of loving humans who like books, pottery, art, sheep, personal development, and beer and who live near me and who all like each other and who are all near my age” I am thinking more along the lines of, “I want to go to a couple social events over the next few months, reconnect with old friends, and maybe find a book club or pottery class or yoga studio that I enjoy.” (Writing that out sounds kind of depressing… like I should be dreaming big and risking being disappointed and/or overwhelmed instead of playing it safer… What do you think?) 

Soooo… all of that being said, I have some other ‘resolutions’ in mind and maybe I’ll share them here in the coming days/weeks/months but for now I would like to do this yoga challenge.
And maybe blog about it occasionally.
And try not to overthink every sentence I type. And not constantly be wondering if am I oversharing. Or if am I rambling too much.  Or I should include more headings and a better organization of my thoughts. Or if I am wasting people’s time.  And to not get caught up in things like stats or views.  Or what is the point of all, and am I just ‘creating content’ to fill up space on the internet, and what is the meaning of life?!

(And to think that I was wondering why I stopped blogging in the first place!) 

Happy New Year!
Here’s to 2020 being the best year yet!