In those moments of extreme joy, I am who I want to be. Smiling, flitting, joyfully bouncing through life. Good day, Random Man at the gas station! Fine day, Mrs. Getting Spinach Too at the grocery store!
Apply a bit of pressure, even if self-imposed, and I no longer twirl about weaving flowers through people’s hair. I start to retreat within my mind of racing thoughts and worries. Deep breath in for four, hold a bit, and whoosh it out.
Once again, I am refusing to let myself get to that old, dreaded point of paralysis. What used to be very, very hard is now much more fun. Hiya! Karate chop to the jugular, Old Girl! You can’t stop me!
Taking Control
Oh, perhaps it’s not so new for me, really. After all, I am the wife who banished her husband from laundry duty forever because the shirts were facing the wrong direction on the hangers. Poor bloke weeps in the night to this very day.
Nah. I don’t mean that type of control at all. That type of control never works. Forcing others to conform to one’s wishes. Any person capable of reading a few magazine articles knows that the only person you have any hope of controlling is yours truly.
How powerful to realize that, yet how difficult to actually implement. How about if I fold those socks, dear? I would gladly hang all those clothes and all of the clothes that come out of the dryer after that forever and ever until we die. (CJ exits stage doing an Irish jig.)
Surely there are bigger things than laundry that need tending.
Prudent Surveillance of Self
As a self-professed and recovering people pleaser and control freak (What a lucky guy that CJ is!), it is important I monitor my thoughts and actions. These days it seems imperative as we prepare to launch the book out into the big, wide world.
What to do? Curl up on the couch and hope someone, perhaps my co-author, contacts the cover designer? Eat six bags of chips while I worry about what people will think when and if they read it? Rearrange the shoes in my closet and hope CJ forgets about the book?
Instead, I walked into the living room and announced, I would feel better if I could go through it just one last time.
And the glorious response? Ok.
I raced to the kitchen, plucked my laptop from the table, and settled myself in with eight or twenty cups of coffee. I read aloud every word we’d written, revised, edited, and gone over so many times I really can’t even estimate.
I let it go because I have done all I could do. I did more than I ever thought I could do. I let it go because it is time for me to let go and let it be whatever it will be in the reader’s hands.
I let go.
And you, dear Jolly reader? We love hearing your thoughts.
