Perspective

If I sleep for eight hours a night, that leaves me with sixteen hours of waking time. That's sixteen hours a day I've pretty much wasted for the last couple of weeks. Hours not spent with my children, my husband, work, hours doing quite literally nothing.

Last night, after being woken up for the third time, I had a hard time going back to sleep. I sat and thought about stories. And slowly with just a bit of pain I began to think about my thesis again. It was tentative thinking--a light touch with a hesitant hand. I found myself afraid to touch too much. I kept waiting for all the doubts to start clamouring for attention. But I brushed up against a few ideas, and set off not warning bells.


Too often I let myself let fear take over. There are too many things in life I've not done, pulled the plug on, or ignored because I was just too scared to take the risk. It is often easier for me to just pull into routine or into doing nothing. I'm afraid that this is what these two weeks have been about. Afraid to love, afraid to work, afraid to make firm choices about not stopping my compulsive eating, etc.

Yesterday feeling emboldened by my foreplay with thesis ideas, I went to get my hair done. This is no cheap adventure. I spend a lot of money on my hair (likely not a lot by California or NYC standards but a lot by mine). And instead of going with the hairstyle I had before, one I loved, I tried to have the new woman modify it a bit. The color came out awesome. Black with these bright red streaks over the top. But the cut? Just bad. It's not that she didn't do a good job. She did a great job and she did what I wanted but...well it just looks horrible on me. Maybe I need to better choose where I'll be risky....

But I am thinking about my thesis. I am thinking about the ways in which we are compelled to tell our stories and how other people use those stories once they are told. How they often become not our stories any longer, and how we may only serve as a soundbite for those stories rather than as the creators.