Who am I? Why am I here?

Edouard Manet, "Breakfast Luncheon on the Grass" (1862-1863).

These are the existential questions that have kept me up at night since around the age of 5 . . . No, just kidding. I’m taking the Blogging 101 course and this is my first assignment!

As to who I am, I am just a girl. Probably more accurately described as a woman (sigh). The other day, I woke up and thought how I would regret not trying to write. I would look back on my life and regret not doing something I loved, even if I was not good at it. That each day that slips by with me not putting fingers to keyboard because I think it’s self-indulgent or because I worry about what other people will think, is actually a sad day, a wasted day. It reminds me how I used to think I looked so wrong when I was a girl (an actual girl) and now I see pictures and realize I didn’t really see me and how I just didn’t look as wrong and ridiculous as I felt. I wish I could go back and tell myself that I was focusing on the wrong things, that I was actually wasting precious mental energy that could have been still and buzzing with unanticipated joy and potential. And, at the same time, knowing that that is youth and venerating all the more this process of growing older.

I am here for the discipline of it. I’ve found over the past couple of years that self-reflection that is kept between my ears is actually more like self-flagellation and instead of moving me down a road keeps me in a perpetual motion machine, a hamster running on a wheel, on a closed circuit, fed only by my re-processed and re-processed mostly inaccurate thoughts and ideas. I’ve found over the past couple of years, that putting fingers to keyboard or screen takes me unintended places and those are good places for me to go. I am here because I’ve started to loosen my grip on my insistence that you think of me in a certain way, the way I want you to see me, because clearly I don’t even really know what’s going on with you or what’s going on with me in any given moment.

I want to follow the trail of joy and marvel at how unexpected and marvelous and unintended and undeserved and counter-intuitive it is all turning out to be.

The featured image is Edouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” painted in 1862-1863. All works by Edouard Manet (1832-1883) are in the public domain.