Apparently, February 2014 is over-achiever’s month.  We have … the Superbowl, the Olympics, the Oscars.  Everywhere I look there are pictures, images, videos of the best.  Even the billboard at the Shell station on Ventura and Laurel Canyon featuring this beautiful drawing of a princess with upraised arms, star of the movie Frozen, touts the best princess.  Last night on my vigil to the grocery store, I looked at that cartoon, the beauty of the drawing, the emotion on that cartoon’s face, emotion that transferred to the carriage of her hands, and thought wistfully, I wish I was her.  Then I thought she’s a cartoon, silly.  And in that moment reality strikes.  My reality, I’m working the last few weeks of my temporary job.  I am one of about 130 people looking at documents on a computer screen seated at a table with one person to my left and two to my right, with four people behind them, and so on.  My placement is lucky because there isn’t a person directly in front of me as is the placement of the rest of the room.  The quarters are so close that talking in inevitable.  I know everyone’s story, or at least their public story.  This is not a glamorous job, and for most of us, it’s a step-down.  Nevertheless, I like it.  Why?  Besides the obvious reason that it’s giving me money to pay my bills, it gives me that money in a way that involves literally no stress or anxiety.  In my real life, for years there has been so much anxiety and stress that it took away vast parts of what I call me.  About a week into the job I am doing now, after the shock of the answer to the question what are you in here for wore off, I realized this job is a gift.  It is a gift because it enables me to afford me, but at the same time because there is no stress, I can devote mental energy that otherwise used to go to thinking about stress into finding me.

During the first week, I really sat there trying to decide what will make me me, thinking about what’s next, and not the what’s next of the past decade or so where I lived solely to get money to pay bills, but what will make my life into what I want it to be.  My thoughts are unorganized, but they are there.  A few days ago, and I posted this, I woke up feeling a wave of creativity, a wave that has continued for a few days.  There are creative interests I have that I haven’t done, mostly because my real life took so unbelievably much time.  My real life has a way one is supposed to be, clothes we are to wear, decorum, words, conduct that we are supposed to have, that in many ways are not at all conducive to being creative, at least not for me.  For me being creative means dancing around the house, singing along to music, altering all my clothes to make them just a little bit cooler or prettier or, if you don’t like it, stranger.  It means reading for inspiration, sometimes writing, sometimes drawing.  And it means this little thought in my head of what if I put this, with that, did this, not that.  It means … letting go.  And so I hope I can keep up my income to allow me the time to do this, not just think about it.  If I can, what I will turn into is going to be different, or perhaps it will be what has always been inside.

Inside….  I like building things.  I like houses.  I want to build a house, or two, or more.  I like making clothes.  They say what I want to make won’t work, that it’s not mainstream, but I guess that means I’ll make what I want to make for myself.  I like writing, good writing.  I like music.  I don’t do any of those things, except in my mind, or for my really small audience of one, me.  I’m a combination of things.  I like girlie things, sparkly things even.  But I’m not like that at home.  At home, I’m just as likely to put on some overalls and climb on the roof.  I don’t know what it is with the roof.  If something needs to be done on the roof, I’m there.  Recently, I had a couple limbs cut off the trees, and I micromanaged that so much, they really should have just handed the saws over to me, all from my vantage point — the roof.  I can fix my car, thankfully, because I’ve had to.  My car blew a tire, and while on the phone with my brother, he told me to change it.  Why?  Because he knows I can.  You would never want to ask me what to get your girlfriend, significant other, or wife as a present because I probably wouldn’t say flowers, not unless they were the kind you get from Home Depot and could plant the yard.  No, I’d say what I want, like a new phone, or a car part, or that $50 drum that the Guitar Center is advertising that I absolutely don’t need or even know what to do with, and you’d be completely in trouble for having listened to me.  I like to say nothing stops me, that my gender doesn’t stop me, except it does.  Something stops me from doing things that are creative.  For some reason I feel like those things are better left done by the trained professionals, or at least done by the trained people who called it their own.  But … why can’t I do those things?

I know the obvious answer is money.  I don’t have the money to build a house.  I don’t have the money to make the clothes on any scale larger than the samples for myself.  But music, what about that?  I have my guitars, my piano.  I could play them.  I could even do what I said I was going to do two weeks ago, but got all intimidated about — write a study of rock for one my articles.  I feel tentative.  I feel completely awkward in my own creativity, and especially awkward about writing a study of rock music and rock music genres to people who have made their own guitars, people who can learn any song just from hearing, heck even people who were in real bands who played real shows on real tours.  I’m going to, soon, but right now I feel like everything in my life is a hairdo that is growing out, like I’m wearing a big shirt because I’d rather not bother with a dress, like when someone says something complimentary and thank you just won’t come out correctly.  I feel like I’m girlie, in a world full of boys or people who are tougher or know what they are doing.  And right now, I’m not even doing girlie right.  Girlie-girls don’t want phones, or car parts, or the drum on sale at Guitar Center that they don’t even know what to do with.  As for that, I’m literally afraid to take my girlie self over to Guitar Center to buy the drum.  It would be like the last time I went into that intimidating place.  Then, about five guys come over to help me, something that sounds good in concept, but freaks me out.  Sure I know what to do when all the sales help in Neiman Marcus want to show me this or that or have me sit for make-up, but Guitar Center and that legion of males who know how to do everything I want to know how to do with a guitar, or an on-sale drum, freaks me out and makes me completely awkward.  I’m this girl in Guitar Center, only for the opposite reason: she can’t figure out how to be girlie, and for me, girlie is getting in the way.

Still once, there was a time I went to buy a guitar strap.  I went into Guitar Center, acted like I knew what I was doing, and went to the accessory room.  There were only two of those guitar dudes working, not the normal legion of five, and then they were much more interested in talking about things other than guitars.  I got my strap, and a little instruction on what to do with it, prompted by my question about which end goes where, knowing even that was a dumb question I should have kept to myself.  I was happy with that purchase, and totally not thinking, said aloud in my girlie voice: “now I’m set, I can dance around with my guitar and pretend I’m Eddie Van Halen”.  Right then, the otherwise good visit to Guitar Center became its tainted-by-my-girlie-awkwardness-normal, and I realized I shouldn’t have said this, not to one of those guys like the ones who discuss guitars, build guitars, play guitars, know everything about guitars, and who would totally not care about this story in my head about rock music, or my creative streak because he’s so good at it all now.  I took my statement about Eddie Van Halen back, at least a little, saying something acknowledging that my audience — the Guitar Center guitar guy — could likely actually play and wouldn’t need to dance around, pretending he is Eddie Van Halen.  But all he did was smile at me.  He took a little second, then, very quietly said, “we all do”.

So while I may keep the results of my creative aspirations to my overly-girlie self, secretly dressed in my house-clothes and feeling a bit like an imposter, I’m going to do this now… this creative everything I’ve always wanted to do.  Perhaps it may even involve a guitar or even that drum that I’m about five minutes away from getting the courage to go buy from the very scary people at Guitar Center.  And I’m going to write my rock genre story too.  Because I know that when all else fails, I can dance around, and sing, and play what I know, and pretend to be Eddie Van Halen, all the while knowing the secret: we all do.