New Blend

a short birthday confession

On weekdays, I endeavor to sneak away into my office at around 2 pm to write; sometimes to you, sometimes to myself. This is a luxury for me; time; time to myself; time to cultivate creativity; time for introspection. More than the time, though, woven through the strands of each second is a thread of delicate hope.

Weaving hope into time—this feels like dangerous work. Hope is more explosive and unstable (for me) than hatred; more rarely resourced; infinitely more potent.

Can I be honest and share with you that my more familiar thread that I have chosen to clothe me, though it keeps me ever-cold, is disappointment. I know how disappointment fits—baggy and weighted, concealing me from myself and others, pulling me into inertia and passivity, blanketing me in the familiar thought that nothing I say or do is worth saying or doing. If I try to write, if I try to carve out time, it will lead only to failure, embarrassment, dryness, despair. Disappointment takes me to my slumbering bed and lulls me to dejected sleep. I have curled up in self-sabotage too many days.

Today is my birthday (I usually don’t tell folks that, but I am doing differently this year!). It’s 3:00 pm and I have secreted away to my office, because I am trying on a new blend: hope, relaxation, and disappointment.

I ain’t perfect or healed yet, so I won’t lie and tell you disappointment is gone. But I am hoping that with the thread of relaxation, I don’t make writing a god or a homework assignment, but the gift and luxury it is. God made me and gave me this. And I think that some of us—hopefully, including you who are reading this—need reminders that we can change clothes; we are not doomed to one experience. We can change our minds.

Expect to receive some crap and some treasure and all sorts of in-between grapplings, because this is the how of when and where I enter this new year.