The Coffee Shop Blues

Earlier today I got together with a friend and by the end of the meeting there I was. Crying in a coffee shop.

She put a lot of things into perspective for me, relating my current nervous breakdown about my career to that of a butterfly coming out of the cocoon. Only she wasn't talking about my career, she was talking about me. Jenn, the person. And she was so right.

Since I got home I've been going over all of it - all the stuff I posted here a few days ago, the business she & I had started molding, our conversation - and I realized the problem is that I'm personally so invested into what I do for a living because who I am and what I do are essentially one in the same. And as soon as that hit me the tears stopped.

I am a writer. As in, its not what I do but who I am. I can't not write. There's something inside me that needs to put everything down on the page. From the voices that tell me what to say about their fictional lives to this kind of journaling bullshit. I never stopped stringing words together once I started.

But somewhere in my head I got it into my head that this was all supposed to be some way or another. I convinced myself that working hard would produce x result at y time.

Well I should've known better. I sucked at algebra when I was younger so trying to find an answer in variables now isn't my best course of action.

My career choice is one of lots of solitude but within the mindset of having lots of people respond to the product that comes from that solitude. The writing.

When I work and work and finally publish it for the world, damn it, I want the world to read it! I want all this time alone, hours spent, keys clicked, to mean something. To the world I mean, because it already means the world to me. I just feel like it's time for it to live in worlds outside of my computer and my family's bookshelves.

AKA: The comfortable little cocoon I'm still living in right now.

So my friend & I put our project on hold so I could work my way out of this chrysalis. I've been kicking at the sides for what feels like forever but apparently I still needed time to germinate. Even if I didn't realize it until I had 6 snotty tissues sitting next to me on the pleather booth at a busy coffee shop, tears cresting my eyelids in front of the world.

Maybe that was exactly what I needed. Because if I really want the world to see, maybe it's time to let them. Flaws & all.