I will write this post poorly. I will write this post poorly. I will write this post poorly.
As you can see, I’m brainwashing myself. My perfectionist tells me I’m a sucky writer, and I feel bad for anyone who has clicked all the way here to read this. Since you’re here, I’ll tell you the culprit of my feelings – rereading what I edited in my book AND the idea I’d share with you. Instantly the “Loading” with dot, dot, dot after it, and the circle trying to catch its own tail filled my mind.
Have you watched that circling hypnotist as long as I have? Past the “I’m waiting” time and into that zone, that space where it becomes an exercise in the art of being present in the outer limits of your psyche. That place is cool.
Something just now sent me cycling again, and my thoughts are all bound up. I almost made an easy X-Lax joke there, but my own groan at myself wouldn’t let me. That’s exactly what I’m talking about! The ability to be authentically me even when I’m struggling and find it.
Perhaps when those black-and-white spirals spin in the middle of my eyeballs, I should just keep moving. I have the fingers, I have the thoughts, I have the experience—I am 42 after all – and I’ll juke out of my own way and trust the process.
Going back to what I was saying, there’s a concern you’ll get into the book, not like it and then abandon me. Oh my goodness, did I just stumble onto an old wound there? Fascinating. In that case, now that I know what it is, I’m ok with you abandoning me.
But what I’m not okay with is me abandoning me? It feels like a big ask, something I don’t know if I can give. but here goes nothing.
I started writing in Virginia, at Pat’s, in a neighborhood where youngish trust fund families renovated homes in oversaturated ways: five feet from the line, not a hair less, and up, up in stories. I imagined calendar makers drooled over the various front door colors in Alexandria’s downtown. And although Pat’s house wasn’t right downtown, we’d sidewind past the enchanting bloated-bellied homes on sidewalks until we did. Often with a heavy canvas bag over her shoulder, Pat, thirty years my senior, would go toe to toe with me on our strolls. It was here, rather there, that lessons came, that history is right now, and to appreciate communication that hits you right in the solar plexus.
My tires had traveled sixty thousand one hundred and twenty-six of Tom Brady’s most gusto football throws to land me at Pat’s. That’s not exactly true. You’ll get a 2,776-mile readout on Google or Apple Maps if you plug in Tukwila, Washington, to Alexandria, Virginia, but my route there was as senseless as a tortoise tracker. So Pat wasn’t in the plan. Heck, I didn’t even know Pat. But when you know someone who tells you you should know someone, often the person who knows you is right.
Days prior, upon seeing a Facebook post of me agonizingly pushing a cannon at Gettysburg, my friend in Washington, Peg messaged, “If you need a soft place to fall,” along with her nearby sister’s location.
Love, Jaclynn
PS. Editing my book and adding it here may take a while. Please be patient, as I’m also trying to be.
PSS This post’s photo is of me and Pat.
Going On 40 