Creating

I have to admit that I feel very far away right now.  I mean, Texas actually is very physically far away from where I was living just last week.  But I mean more emotionally:  I email my friends, and I hungrily read the posts and reports about the workshop this weekend, and I feel outside.  I feel like the loner in high school standing at the side of the hallway looking on enviously at the beautiful popular girls as they stride past, making everything look easy and confident and lovely.  I feel outside the magic.

I chose this distance.  For many reasons, the primary one being family, it was right for me to choose this relocation.  But I moved from feeling in the center of things to being way out on the periphery.  It feels lonely and wistful.

Do you ever feel like an outsider?  Like the one who just doesn't get it?  Who is mystified about how to fit in or be liked or how to enjoy the things that this group of people seems to like so much?  Have you ever been inside and then chosen to step away because you had to or needed to? 

It's hard.  I've been outside a lot in my life, and I have learned that the very things that made me odd or unpopular at certain times in my life ended up being the most valuable things about me at other points. 

This last decade of my life I felt more like I was on the inside, though.  I had worked and studied and risked and succeeded, and I felt the magic.  And I also created, with Emily, my own magic with Doodlebugheart.  It is a deeply intimate company in so many ways.  I certainly consider myself still very vital, but the distance makes me uncertain on how to do things now.  It's just different.

I wanted to be a part of that workshop, to trust and risk and jabber, to create and find insights and friendships.

Instead, I'm in Texas, in a limbo of sorts between my old life and my new life, having moved from my old town and home and not yet having moved into my new town or home.

It's a whopper of a transition.

It's why we started our company, transitions.  They are hard.  They are by definition somewhere new and unfamiliar, the between of what we knew and where we will end up.  They are uncomfortable.  As in, we are "out of our comfort zone".  In Doodlebugheart, we teach that this is the golden time.  This is where the art of our lives are created.   This is the emergence of the new from the old and we try to offer tools to enlighten and ease that journey so that we can embrace it rather than fear it.  I have so many transitions to embrace.  I have left my career, my friends, my town, my home and am starting all of that anew or in a different way.

Plus (and I believe this is called "burying the lead" in journalism) I have one more transition to face.  A biggie.

I'm pregnant.  Again.

I am thrilled.  And surprised.  And scared.  And nauseous.

I have my first doctor's visit on Monday.  I will be able to breathe again if everything goes well there.

I feel a little like a wet blanket writing this after the exuberance of the workshop posts, and the warmth and honesty of our guest blogger Tracey.  However, the one thing Emily and I always strive for is honesty, with ourselves, with each other, and with you.  So all I can do is say that I am facing a crapload of transitions and I would like to share the journey of those with you.  And I would like to do it honestly, which may not be as perky and inspirational as I might wish it to be.  I will be cranky, and self-pitying, and be overwhelmed, and just fail in pretty big ways.  I would like to share what I figure out as I try once more to go from being an outsider to creating my own magic again.

And maybe, just maybe, I will be creating a new life.  My own, and my baby's.

Wish me luck.