The Who AND The What....Part 2

[Okay, I know, I'm probably boring you to death with my recent revelations, but I need to process and document this so that at some point (probably in the near future) when my brain succumbs to some fog or the other, one of you can email me these posts - like a cyber kick in the ass - to remind me that I have, indeed, figured some of my stuff out. Here's point number two and then I will return to our regularily scheduled 'hairy Bermuda triangle' type posts. Promise.] For a friend, who stopped because the weather man predicted rain. And for weirdness and timing, 'cause I wrote this yesterday morning, long before I read your email. And because words do matter. I can't remember a time when I didn't aspire to express myself creatively. I played dress up, I wrote poems and stories, I figure skated, danced, painted and drew pictures, kept melodramatic journals, acted, sang, choreographed theatrical numbers in the living room to LP's on the folks old stereo and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. And watched for what I thought was necessary - for all the stars to align, for the sun to reach it's zenith, for the wind to blow in just the right direction. For the perfect time, the perfect place and the perfect thing to come along. And all these things never happened. So I waited. Thing with waiting is, it's harder than it looks. It eats at you after a while. And then, it gives way to defeat. The kind of defeat that says 'you suck - you didn't even try and you've given up'. It's a bad road to travel. You aren't exactly sure how you got there, and you have no clue how to get home. You're sure that you can't go back and moving forward seems like blind navigation, so you stay put. Stuck. So stuck is where I've been for the better part of the last decade. I turned 25, had an anxiety attack about being 'a quarter century old' - as my father-in-law put it - and decided I should have already accomplished something with my life. So, HEY! here's an idea: why don't I just curl up in a ball and wait out the remainder of my life? More or less. I've dabbled in things. Painting. Acting. Writing. Directing. None of which were more than the equivalent of a chicken-shit toe in an icy cold lake followed by a rapid retreat back to the warmth of my waiting. When I was a kid I was a wee bit afraid of the dark, especially the dark that descended in my grandparents farm house. I discovered, after a while, that if I shut my eyes tight before the lights were turned off and kept them shut, I could trick my brain into imagining that the lights were still on after the absolute of that Ontario-winter-deep-in-the-country dark blanketed me. In posting every day, I realized that I've been tricking my brain into thinking that I couldn't navigate a way out of waiting, eyes shut tight, imagining I'm stuck. Last month I did something different. I stopped waiting. Each day, finding my way, NOT waiting for the perfect topic, the right light, an uninterupted(?) block of time, an audience, a purpose or a plan. I opened my eyes and discovered I'm not stuck, after all. And I never was.