winding mind

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Again. It’s becoming a thing that happens when my headspace is cloudy and I could stare out into space thinking about everything and nothing in particular.

My head has just been elsewhere. I’m becoming that person who is physically present and yet not there. There’s a distance and a displacement. It’s like when you finish an epic book or watch a really poignant movie and it stays with you; you can’t shake this feeling that you were somewhere else and that place isn’t in your present.

Does that make sense yet?

I think it’s the collision of life. If Peace Corps had worked, I would be prepping for coming home for the holidays. I’d be having a dress made to have Thanksgiving with the Ambassador in Bamako and planning Christmas gifts for the family. I’d be planning for a twenty-four hour travel and totally flipping out in excitement.

But that’s not my life.

And yet, nor is my life one at home with the family.

Life is this third option. I’m in Michigan. My family is in Indiana. My brother is in Arizona. My friends are on the East Coast.

Still, I’m totally stoked to go home. I’m going home in about 11 days for Thanksgiving. That will be great. It will be Americana and holiday fun.

But in those eleven days my head is not here. It’s somewhere else. It’s bogged around in life of a twenty-four year old and the thirty-six lives of teenagers. It’s worry and fun. It’s fighting between wild and free and parental.

I let all of them in. The girls and their lives, they are a part of me, and they are in my heart and soul. I dream about their problems and cross my fingers for every audition. I am there for every step. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But my head is still fuzzy with it all.

It’s intertwining of a million things--of me and the people around me. It’s the craziness of life and the chaos of being young. It’s fighting for your place and searching for the authenticity of who you are. It’s curiosity and fear, happiness and excitement.

The things in there are hard to articulate. Those are the things that I give away in written word, in a sideway glance, in one comment. It’s the dark and twisty. It’s the unknown. It’s the complicated.

It’s the windy inner world of my mind. 

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