Thursday 2 May 2013

A Trip Down a Blogger's Past

These past few days I have been going through some of my old content from a blog that I posted on over five years ago. It's kinda been a trip.

I almost feel like I've been reading a diary from Jr. High or something (which doesn't say a lot about my blogging skills at that point...great blogs are not just public diaries...oopsies).

Some of the posts are borderline embarrassing - the things that used to perplex me, the things I grappled with, how hard I tried to figure out what my life was "supposed to look like" - at some point I almost wanted to grab my own shoulders and shout "JUST RELAX!"

I realize that I spent a lot of my time striving...for what, I'm not exactly sure...but I know that at the time it seemed to me that life had  script, and as long as I was responsible, and made good choices, and worked hard, this script would unfold itself, showing me where to go next and giving me cues as to what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

Flash forward five years and maybe I'm just beginning to understand what people mean by "march to the beat of your own drum." I may have thought that I was doing that before, but now I see how internalized the metronome of life can be. I wasn't really making my own music, but instead just playing to the beat of what I thought it was supposed to sound like.

Now I just don't give a fuck.

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I don't know what changed, or how I got here, but the vast difference between who I am now and who I was in those posts is that now I don't care what I "should be doing"  - I'm just goin' for it. I'm making it up as I go along, probably making a mess of everything, vastly aware that I am not perfect and should not be left to my own devices.

But there is a downside over here.

I discovered this after having lunch with a girlfriend earlier this week. She's in the publishing industry, and works for a company that produces cookbooks. She's been an awesome resource on my cookbook project - asking me great questions, helping me think through the viability of my book, and continuing to push me to make progress.

But after I walked away from lunch - I felt so overwhelmed. 

The downside of marching to the beat of your own drum is that it is TOTALLY EXPOSED. There's no band to hide behind, no one to take lead when you're faltering...it all you.

As I walked through the financial district, swimming with thoughts about my book, I had this one over arching thought.... "What if I fail?"

What if it sucks? Or worse what if I don't finish it? Or worst of all, What if it's not real and substantial, but just some cute little project that a bored little housewife put together to keep herself occupied?

fuuuuuuck.

Those thoughts came roaring through like a fire engine. And they've been hanging out in the background since Monday.

This morning, something else came charging back from 2007. But not from my old blog, or from my twenty-four year old brain.

Oddly, from Pandora.

I have a station that plays just normal music - it's for when I'm busy and I just need background noise. Nothing good ever plays on this station, and definitely nothing from five years ago.

This song shows up [play it, do it do it do it do it]:



Yes.

Rascall Flats.

When this song started playing, I literally came out of the bathroom with a sponge and cleaner in hand and did this:

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This was a song that I listened to like 12o9235h,13729357837,98 times during a rough time in my mid twenties. It made me feel like I had a fighting chance of making it through all the crap of being twenty-four.

Listening to this song five years later, I remembered something.  I remembered I was tough, and I'm kinda rad sometimes, and that I can handle failure. So then there was these thoughts:

"Who cares if it's real? Get out there and do your thing - you know who you are, and you know what to do...it may be scary as hell to make your own way, but amazing things are never going to happen to you unless you're willing to be your weird-crazy-destructive-creative-I-do-what-I-want self. Good things will come from that girl. Let her out."

And then I made this face:



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Ok sweet angle faces, thanks for indulging me in a reflective-emotional-country-music-playing Thursday. I hope reading this, and listening to my favorite song from 2007 makes you wanna stand up and scream:


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Hug and Kiss,
-J

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