lessons.

For someone who lives for perpetual efficiency and self-improvement, it’s hard for me to make peace with the fact that life is basically about learning the same freaking lessons over and over again. Through every stage of life, you forget and you re-learn. It’s infuriating, but I guess it’s also human. 

I’m coming up on a big birthday. It feels important, but in the context of everything else happening and changing, it feels like a blip that will come and go. And I’ve never been one for wild celebrations, especially not when I’m the center of attention. My current plan to ring in the big 3-0? Fresh flowers, take-out fried chicken, and a bottle of Prosecco (and hanging out with my manfriend-for-life). And the actual day will be bookend-ed by a flood of visitors, old friends who make me feel like myself, and that’s something to celebrate.

So I’m working on my birthday list*. I’m feeling pleased with my progress on last year. I started writing my new list before I looked back at this last year’s list, and I’m also feeling a little surprised/not surprised by how many things are coming back around again. I may be resolving to BE CONFIDENT until the end of time, or at least until I’m 100, after which I won’t care. But I think that’s good, actually. It’s good to see myself as I am and as I want to be, to see my own strengths and weaknesses clearly.

So I'm just working, learning lessons, thinking/overthinking on life, and listening to the wild chorus of end-of-summer cicadas just outside my window.

Also, I’m eating frogs today like a boss.

*Birthday lists gone by: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.

things-to-figure-out.

I’ve been putting off an update here because the longer time stretches and the more that happens, the more I lose sight of why I come back here. It starts to feel like this space is impossibly far away from my actual life. I’ve been living some sort of fairyland-crazy life the past few months. I’ve felt trapped beneath a mountain of work (with no end in sight), meanwhile there’s been a parade of friends and family and good food and beaches and moving to a new city full of new adventures.

I don’t feel just one thing. I feel everything. J and I were talking about the emotional life of characters (after a play we saw last weekend), and he said that actors have to channel the fact that humans are feeling a constant, tumbling flood of emotions. You aren’t just HAPPY or ANGRY. From second to second, different emotions are flowing through you, and every so often one emotion lands and sticks a bit longer. Good actors bring this emotional depth to their performances. Good humans (like me) acknowledge that we’re feeling a lot of things all the time.

I’m sitting in my living room right now in our (new) little corner of Chicago, as of three weeks ago. The sky is blue, there’s a tree outside this window, and a warm fall breeze is blowing. I can see the Sears Tower (I mean the Willis Tower). We don’t have a coffee table yet, so there’s nowhere to put my feet up. I’m sitting on the ugly-but-comfortable couch smelling a plum cake that I just pulled out of the oven.

There’s a lot going on right now. My to do list feels endless. Beside the things-to-do, there are things-to-figure-out. WEDDING. Finding freelance work. Finding friends in a new city. A project for the first actual class I’ve taken in seven years.

decision fatigue, etc.

I just automatically went through at least half a dozen steps. I opened up the link to my blog and signed in. I opened Google Drive and clicked on the folder where I keep daily writing and rambling. I opened a blank document. I named it 2aug2015. And all of the sudden I couldn’t even remember what I was doing or why. But I just came back to myself and remembered: OH YES, I’m writing.

I was thinking today about how the weight of making decisions is exhausting. It leaves me feeling drained the same way that talking to too many people drains me. Decision fatigue - actually, I’m certain that’s a thing. I think I read somewhere recently that you can be more productive if you eliminate unnecessary decisions. You can do things like wear the same outfit/style every day, or make the same breakfast every morning. Eliminating those choices gives you a little more capacity for making other decisions. And I think I understand that. For example, I love thinking about what to make for dinner, but if I’m overwhelmed in other areas of life, I just...can’t. I can make beans and rice or fried eggs on toast or I can order pizza. So while information and work are infinite, our decision making brains are not.

I read an article this morning from the New York Times blog about how walking in nature changes our brains. “Most of us today live in cities and spend far less time outside in green, natural spaces than people did several generations ago. City dwellers also have a higher risk for anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses than people living outside urban centers, studies show.” Yikes. It always floors me that simple physical activities can have such an influence over the mental and emotional state, something that seems so mysterious to me.

awake.

Let’s get into it.

Things feel big lately--big projects, big changes, big decisions. BIG IDEAS. I close out each day with a fair dose of mental fatigue and a wired brain that still can’t sleep. My old self, who used to crawl into bed at 10pm and wake up fresh and ready at 6:30am, now waits for J to get home from work and crawls into bed at 12:30am or 1:00am. And then crawls back out at 6:30am. This Cape Cod summer has been amazing. I’ve spent plenty of time at the beach (and have the white-blonde hair and tanned skin to prove it), I see and smell the ocean all around me, I’ve eaten a LOT of ice cream cones and clam strips and oysters…..but this summer has not felt anything like a vacation.

I’m navigating some combination of very excited and very scared right now, but I think it’s exactly how I should feel. I feel wide awake.

I’m writing a lot, and for the first time that I can remember (ever ever ever), I have projects that I’m working on. I have projects! Writing projects! I’m working on a couple different essays, and the ideas keep coming for more.

I’m finishing a notebook this week, one that I only started in May. I don’t know if I can even capture what an accomplishment that feels like.

I’m in the weeds of forming opinions, thinking critically about things, making decisions.

And I’m also taking in an embarrassing amount of Grey’s Anatomy, because I’m a person who watches crappy TV sometimes and enjoys it.

We have barely more than two weeks left here in Wellfleet. I can’t believe how it flew by, and I can’t believe how much it felt like things happened and changed. Chicago is waiting for us, and whatever else (grad school, new career, marriage, la la la). Like I said, things feel big.

clarity.

What a whirlwind lately. The claims on my daily allotment of hours are swimming in my head. It’s good (it’s good!) but also leaves me feeling like I can barely scrape out 30 minutes to sit down and write here.

Since last weekend, I’ve been thinking about this interview with Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn for On Being. I’ve listened to it a handful of times. I tried to explain it to J last night: it’s so heartening to hear from people who have made lives out of art for the purpose of being better people in the world.

Towards the end of the interview, Abigail talks about her experiences as a sensitive, empathetic child - how she often felt darkness because she was so attuned to the feelings of other people who were feeling darkness. And now, she's realized that her music can be a container for those feelings, that she can feel them deeply but also let them go.

Right now, my writing isn’t so much a container for feelings as a place where I’m forced to confront them. But I think that’s the first step in the right direction.

At any rate, it’s a kickass interview and worth a listen. It's a bit of clarity in the madness.