Walls made grey by the blur of the black and white papers I push are staring back at me. My sadness reverberates off of the cubicle making it impossible to think of anything but you. You could stop time. Our love held the world in place. Our lovemaking turned it topsy-turvy. My head over my heels, I felt the rush of tumbling to life every time we touched. We fit a universe between the four walls of your bedroom. I was content to explore it indefinitely.
But the weight of our union made Atlas shrug. You weren’t ready for a love like this. The dense thickness almost swallowed you whole. And as you buckled under the pressure, I cried oceans of tears. I cried forty days and forty nights and moved no mountains. So, I roared with hell-fire made hot from anger, pain, and disappointment. I scorched our earth. I lay spent in our ashes. Too tired to thumb a ride to a new earth with the next passerby in the night sky, I flung my hitchhiker’s guide out of sight and out of mind. And prepared myself for the long process of building a new world with you from the remains.
So, this blog was going to be super serious. I labored over finding a name and dreamed of fame and fortune and people around the country connecting with my struggle to find my place in the world. Now I realize that my focus shouldn’t be on that. What I need now more than anything else is an outlet. A place to get my thoughts out of my head. So, I’m going to blog about whatever comes to mind and feels urgent enough to put pen to paper. If people like it, awesome. If not? I’ll live. And write anyway.
Exploring a new place makes me giddy. The people, sounds, culture, food, danger, and anonymity of being in a new city or country that I must navigate make me feel alive. Very few people in this world get paid to travel and drink in the experience. A career that allows me to work anywhere and pays enough for me to travel sounds like the next best thing. With dreams of living in a new country every year or 2, I decided coding could be my meal and plane ticket. “The internet is global so the possibilities are endless”, I told myself. Armed with the bits and pieces of knowledge gleaned from dating tech geeks for the past 8 years of my life, I sat down at my computer determined to learn the languages that would open the doors to a future I ‘d love. I quickly signed into Code Academy and started my lessons. The realization that this was not for me came just as quickly. The lessons
were easy to understand. Within minutes I was able to proudly show my boyfriend my first heading I’d created which read, “Beyonce is my spirit animal.” But King Bey wasn’t enough to keep me coding. I found it terribly tedious and boring—the death knell for anything that requires my attention. So, this blog will live another day as I try to figure out what to do with my life.
I have accepted a writing challenge. I must write every day 30 days. This won’t be easy. Squeezing these words into tiny spaces of free time seems a near impossible task. And I definitely don’t have time to post these musings on my blog every day. But I will write. And I will post when I can. And my life will be better for it. I hope.
Making myself write every day will force me to think more about my path and passion. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind. Everything seems so urgent. So pressing. And when there is a break in the weight, I just want to collapse on my sofa and lose myself in whatever Bravo or the Science channel happens to be showing. But this blog is about doing. It’s about trying. So, I will put pen to paper every day in the hopes that laying my thoughts bare and being accountable (to myself and the other challenge participants) will bring me closer to my purpose.
Flighty. This world was used to describe me by a snarky (to put it politely) person who, at the time, I considered a close friend. When I try to wrap the word around myself, it doesn’t fit. I wake up Monday - Friday, weariness be damned, in the 5 o’clock hour. I sit up, swing my legs over the side of the bed, and sit there for a while to gather myself. Each step in my morning routine brings me closer to arriving at the 8 to 4 job that often keeps me there far later. I pay my mortgage. I give Verizon my first born every month. I go to school full-time so I can be upwardly mobile. Mobile, period. Some days I want to run away. But instead of breaking into a full sprint in the opposite direction, I keep moving toward the things I need to do whether I want to or not. Flighty? I don’t think so.
Some people’s passion finds them. Born with otherworldly talent, a music career is spun from albums and appearances. A physics class in high school ignites an interest that grows into a career as an engineer. But what do you do if your passion hasn’t found you? How do you find it? I don’t really know the answer to that question. I suppose you start somewhere. So, here is my beginning. Armed with a world full of things to try and a blog, I am leading an inquisition.
