This afternoon I trudged my way through a novel I wasn’t in love with but wanted to finish just to say I did. (I finished reading a book today. There–that was satisfying.) My main beef with the book was that every chapter was told from the perspective of a different character. (I hate that.) It felt schizophrenic, akin to eight of your family members trying to tell the same story at the dinner table. I kept thinking, Who’s talking NOW? I really thought about putting the book away, pretending I’d never picked it up, but it had a really cool (like really cool) cover, so I thought, There’s gotta be something good in here SOMEWHERE. And there was something good–it was the story of a kid who lives with his gay father and his partner, and there were a few really beautiful moments. So it’s not like it was a total waste of time.

This evening I ate dinner with some friends and dance students before we had a lesson. Y’all, we honest-to-god sat around a dining room table. Like Donna Reed or Father Knows Best. It was adorable. We talked to each other. No one reached for their phone. We used spoons. It was so–so–sophisticated. Then after we danced, I visited my friends that I house sat for last week. They just got a new sound system, and for a while we simply sat and listened to blues music, shot the shit. I can’t tell you how nice both these experiences were–dinner with friends, bonding. I’m often so focused on being productive, thinking, What do I have to do next?, that I don’t slow down to soak life in or let it relax me in the process.

Something about relaxing. I’m not sure I know how to do that. Let’s just say I don’t, since everything is nearly always a to-do list item. (That’s fun for some people, right?) Like right now I’m sitting in a chair, pretty comfortable, but I’m not RELAXED. Rather, I’m thinking about how I “need” to get this blog done so I can let the dog out then fall down in bed. So many days it feels like that, that my body has “had it,” and yet I force it to go-go-go a little or a lot more.

No wonder it won’t relax.

Reading what I just wrote, I’m going to try to do something about it. Blog earlier, blog shorter. Take a nap. Not push myself so fucking much. I’m really not sure when that started, my inner DRIVE. My therapist says that I have everything I need to be successful, that those things won’t go away just because I don’t push every day. She says I could take a year off–hell, five–and everything I need will still be there, that I could gear down and still get where I’m going. And yet it FEELS like I have to arrive and arrive now. I really would like to take my therapist’s message to heart, to stop acting like every item on my mental calendar is an emergency. WE HAVE TO READ A BOOK THEN MAKE A BANK DEPOSIT! So this is something I’m working on, slowing down from the inside out, learning how and when to stop-stop-stop.