Sunday evening blues, with a silver lining.

It’s my hunch that I’m going to lean heavily on the version of me who will be editing this tomorrow (ie, today)—likely more clear-headed than the version of me who sits before you now. And I know that there will come a time—some evening soon—when I will be triumphantly writing to you again, dear reader, about the conquest I had made in overcoming my reservations, setbacks, hesitations, fears…which all seem to amass like a wall made of people standing on each other’s shoulders when it’s time for me to start something in earnest which is new to me somehow, and therefore intimidating.

Tonight, however, is not that night.

Tonight I am on the other side of a day spent fighting a cold; preparing my notes for the “big, new” pieces I am going to write; cooking food for which I had little appetite, yet ate a heaping bowl of and am now insatiably thirsty; standing under a hot shower with my eyes closed for so long, I almost lost my sense of place and time, which sometimes happens to me in the shower when I am very tired.

And when I am so tired, and most especially when I have a cold, the color from life gets bled out a little, so that it is difficult to get excited about things or to get fired up or to rally myself to face things head on, which is what I have become so good at doing. And it’s a strange sort of life when your friends all live somewhere else for the most part, and your family is too far away to reasonably visit on the weekends without much planning. I feel so ungrateful, writing about what I am building up to here, but I can’t be the only one in these shoes and so I feel it important to talk about.

This is something I have written about before, over a year ago when my life was suddenly changing so rapidly for the better, yet I found myself at this uncomfortable crossroads.

We pray and we pray for our life’s circumstances to change, and maybe we even comprehend that such a change will require a change in oneself, as well. And with such fervor and ecstatic gratitude have I prayed to be a working writer with projects and commissions that light a spark in my spirit, only to be sitting here now with a roster of work I could have only imagined at one point—and knowing, as well, that this is only the beginning. And that through this beginning there’s the gateway to bigger opportunities and even more exciting, and especially fulfilling work, with more responsibility and greater autonomy on my part.

And yet…I hesitate.

That little child inside of me seems to be saying, “Take one more step, and things will never be the same again.” As if childhood will officially be over; kicked out of Never-Never Land forever. 

But the thing is, childhood has been over for a while. I traded my pixie dust in for a typewriter ages ago.

And though what I have in the here and now has so much beauty and offers so much to be grateful for and to appreciate, this is a passing phase, a transition. Somewhere, there is a man who is wondering where I’ve been all these years, and a home that will know all the joyful Friday night dinners of laughter and debate and copious meals shared in abundance with friends and family alike. These things technically are in the here and now, but also, they are not. It is my present-moment choices that will guide me there. Yet sometimes I feel paralyzed by the hugeness of it all—the magnitude of having to seize every moment, for one’s very future is hanging in the void. Or so it seems.

And because I try so hard and work so hard, to have a weekend spent coming down with a cold and binge-watching The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem on Netflix sort of me set me up to feel all the most difficult feelings this Sunday evening, gulping down water, wet curls almost dried, giving it all back to God, for that is the only way I will get any sleep tonight.

Thinking of you, dear reader.