Archive for life lessons
On Growing Up.
Posted by: | CommentsI sit on my couch and look around at the never ending floorboards or I am sitting in my car with Oprah at the other end of our journey or listening to the basketball thumping against my concrete driveway and I wonder when all of this happened. When and how I managed to build this life that is swirling around me and how exactly I built it.
One day at a time, I suppose.
And then I am at the bar surrounded by people who have surrounded me my whole life and they are rambling about politics and work/life balance and if I had the energy I would tell them how much I disagreed with everything they were saying.
I would tell them that they were wrong.
But it is almost midnight and my mind is running on empty. Or maybe it is because I have had enough beers to not care about how wrong they are.
You can’t change everyone, I suppose.
I catch myself in the mirror and I am surprised at the ghostly color of my skin. I notice a few small lines running down my chest that will one day turn into wrinkles that I will think about getting botoxed. Lines from the years I laid in tanning beds avoiding the color reflecting back at me. But, friends get cancer and shit gets real and tanning beds begin to seem like a wacky science experiment and you start to wonder in what universe they seemed like a good idea.
And I wonder what other things I will cast aside and look back and laugh about. The childish things I will do now, when I can still get away with childish things and where that line is when you have to cast away your glitter tops and drunken dancing for business suits and cars that aren’t lime green.
And I wonder if I will miss that line entirely and be the crazy aunt in the corner with her sequins top and over processed blonde hair, and I think I might be ok with that.
Ok with never growing up.
Ok with staying childish and keeping sparkly gold glitter glue and Dr. Seuss greeting cards in the drawers of my desk.
On Being the People We Used to Be.
Posted by: | CommentsI have always pushed myself to write about the things that I couldn’t speak. In high school I would hide in my bedroom and tap the keys of an old typewriter. No, I didn’t grow up in the era of Typewriters but we didn’t have a computer and I liked the sound of each letter hitting the page. I would spill all of my feelings and stories and the things I wished that I would have said to that person I didn’t say anything to.
I have a box in my house filled with those stories, those moments, those secrets. I have never been able to bring myself to read those moments.
To go back.
To re-live that time.
I have spent the past year and a half trying to figure out how to write a book on the project that I started so long ago. I felt like I needed to weave my stories into your stories and make some cohesive message. So I pushed myself to write about things I didn’t want to write about. To share parts of my life that you won’t find in the archives of this blog regardless of how deep you dig.
I hired a writing coach and I sent these pages over to her. She read the proposal and then she read my blog and she gave me some insight that changed everything.
When she read my blog she found this young single mom living in the middle of nowhere who had it “going on” working for a PR agency in New York When she read my proposal my voice didn’t match who I was online.
My voice seemed forced.
It seemed hesitant.
I have always felt guilty for not sharing my whole life on this blog. In a world where transparency is the key to life I am about as transparent as a brick wall. I would try and write the stories I felt I needed to share, the stories the world might need to hear, the stories that would prove once and for all that I wasn’t the girl you thought I was.
I have been walking around thinking that I wasn’t the girl you thought I was.
Waiting for the moment when you pulled the curtains open to reveal that I was simply an actor playing the part without a single notion that I actually knew what I was doing.
The thing is, I DO know what I am doing. And just because I haven’t always known and there are things that I don’t share in this online space, that doesn’t mean I am hiding.
In the past three years my life has changed dramatically. I have achieved things I never imagined achieving and I have been trying to figure out how to deal with it. How do I make sense of all of this good when things were so bad for so long?
I can make sense out of it now because the people we used to be don’t own the people we are.
