Thursday, October 4, 2018

Now is the moment

I was sitting on my couch last night, curled up in a ball, watching the previous night's Daily Show and scrolling through my facebook feed when all of a sudden a thought pierced my brain.

Now is the moment. 

And I started to feel excited and nauseated and teary.

My girls are in school. I am home alone. For how long have I been telling myself that it was all waiting for now, that this was the moment when I could really "be a writer." That this was my chance to do what mattered to me, to be who I always wanted to be.

Jesus Christ, that's a terrifying thought.

I don't wanna put myself out there, I don't wanna take risks, I don't wanna be rejected and embarrassed and fail.  I just want to stay safe in my cocoon.

But what is it Brene Brown says? "Unused creativity isn't benign. It metastasizes."

I can feel it growing inside of me.

Every day that I don't write, that I don't take steps to in some way TRY to do this thing that I want more than anything and that terrifies me even more than I want it, I start to feel this thing inside me grow. It's dark, and it's hard and scary. It has a voice that tells me "See? You're nobody. You're a quitter. You were never meant to be great or beautiful or anything but ordinary." And every day that I feed it that unused creativity, the words that I'm not putting on paper, the rawness and vulnerability that I don't want anyone to see, it gets bigger. Stronger.

I think I've been waiting for it to blow up. For something to just happen where all of a sudden I couldn't help it anymore and I just needed to finally become.

But that's not how I feel. It's crushing me. It's not pushing out, it's pushing in. It's making me smaller.

Now is the moment.

It's time to explode.

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Gifted

Last year, halfway through first grade, my Big Girl was identified as gifted.

I mean, I wasn't really surprised.

This is my girl who was reading chapter books on her own when she was 4. I've been trying to keep up with her pretty much since she was born.

Sometimes it's hard for me to talk about this because it feels like I'm bragging. But here's the thing about having a gifted child. Sometimes? It really sucks.

She's in second grade now and she does third grade math. She does fourth grade spelling words. She reads at a sixth grade level. She does theater in the summer and plays piano.  She also goes to therapy, and still routinely melts down to the point where she isn't coming back. She breaks into tears when playing with kids her age on our street because none of them take direction or respect a script.

When I started reading about giftedness, I realized that intensity is almost part of the definition. Almost all gifted people have this emotional, sensory, and creative intensity. Greeeat.  Another thing that's characteristic? Asynchronous development. Meaning that large parts of her brain can't keep up with her intellect. Meaning that when I think of her like she's twenty because she knows more than a lot of adults, I'm really expecting things of her that she can't do.

It's exhausting. She's all consuming. And she has a sister who is, in entirely different ways, also all consuming. Meaning that most of the time, I'm more than completely consumed. My resources went negative a long time ago.

There's so much about BG to be grateful for, so much to adore and even to respect, and I try every day to be worthy of her. But dude, I'm exhausted.