To Who I Am Becoming...

Every night, in a room that might resemble a comfortable conference room, three people walk in and sit around a table. Each is dressed differently and reflects the positions they hold. One is dressed in loose dark clothing. She is uncomfortable at the table and yet makes sure that her presence is known for she will be in the position of power, one day. The next woman is dressed as though she has just stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine for powerful women. Her black and white suit is stylish and pressed. She is clearly comfortable with her documents, notebooks, and beverage. Where ever she sits, in her mind, she is ultimately in charge. The last woman contrasts greatly from the first two. She does not see herself as "in charge" because she sees no hierarchy. No one is above another. She two has brought documents and notebooks with her but each is bright and fanciful. She too is dressed as though she tried to fit every color she could think of into one outfit and yet st...

I sit at my desk, in my dark office, surrounded by faces of family members and loved ones. Pictures, tokens, and anything that reminds me of those who are not with me engulf my space. I truthfully don't know if this makes being in my office easier or harder. Certainly, I love thinking about games, laughter, and stories from other places but I also need to be awake to the emerging stories that are happening here which doesn't happen when you are living in the past.  I don't know why I am also being resistant to some of the work I need to do. I enjoy my research, I tell myself often. I like my participants and thinking about their lives. I like writing and finding beautiful words to describe the indescribable. And yet, I am unable to, in that moment, do the work that I love. Somehow it does emerge and words and pages are formed but I do not yet know how it happens when I so clearly refuse to work.  Despite this feeling, I show up at my office everyday. I sit at my desk...

Truth be told, I’m not sure why I am writing this morning. Perhaps it is because I feel like I should be writing more often. I don’t know. As I write it seems that my fingers are no longer used to typing out words. Nearly every other word, it seems, needs to be back traces or re-written. It seems that my thoughts no longer know the path from the brain to the fingers the way that they once did. I wrote such wonderful things. Such amazing, beautiful, magnificent things. But now it seems that I can only write about how I no longer write. I keep looking online for things to improve my life. I watch shows and wish I were the people who did amazing things. I am looking and looking but not finding. What is it about me that cannot be the person I see when I close my eyes? Why can I not WRITE !!?? I think for the next little while I will make a promise to myself. Every morning, before I start work, I will write something. It will not be elegant or eloquent. It may ...

I have always considered myself as an open person. No one could ever say that I was an "over-sharer" but ask me a question, any question, and I will tell you an answer or tell you that I will not be answering that question. This particular trait has gotten me in trouble on more than one occasion. I learned early in my life that people often ask questions that they do not really want someone to answer, especially not truthfully. So now I ask, when I sense that someone might be asking me one of these questions, if it is a question that they really want an answer to. Some have responded yes, to mixed results. Most change the subject or continue their musings without giving me time to answer. For myself, I rarely ask anyone a question or for someone's opinion of me because I am not sure that I would want to hear what would be said to me. I have never thought about this particular quirk of mine. I figured that it was a quality that made others like me (whether or not I liked...

She sat at her desk. It had been a nice walk from her home to the place that often felt more like home than where she lay her head at night. It had been a long while since she had picked up her pen to write anything but something compelled her to write today. Perhaps it was the rain that seemed to wash away all of the refuse that muddled the world. With the cleansing rain went her indecision and ambiguity. She was remembering how she had come to this place, this desk, this life. Somehow she had forgotten how she had come to be over the years. Those memories had been buried under "To Do" lists and obligations and her own desires to please others. Who knows when it became more important for her to honour other's stories for her than herself but it had. In the quiet moments, on walks or the silent melodies of rain falling, she longed to run to trees and earth and write her connection with the world as she had done in the past. Today would not be the day to drive out of the...

It is odd, I think, how something grabs you, pulls you into its self even before you know that it has happened. Yesterday I decided to walk home. It was one of the rare days where the sun and its accompanying warmth were something I enjoyed instead of being pained by. It was good to have the time alone. Even with people all around me I felt a comforting separation, like the way you feel when wind blows so hard against your body that you feel you could lean right into it and the force of the wind would hold you up. How does the song go? Alone but not lonely? That is how it felt. There was only me; my consistent breaths filling every space in myself, the tension of my blood filling my veins as it has longed to do for some time, the elation of my muscles, relaxed yet exuberant in the exertion. My rhythmic footfalls seem to pulse in time with the rest of me and seems to count time moving forward and yet not moving, like how running on a treadmill makes you feel like you have moved great di...