So I was just congratulating myself on my weekend comeback . . .
I spent the entire day yesterday watching Lifetime movies (the horrible, kidnappy kind) and waiting for the forecasted late April Michigan snow . . . even though my apartment is falling apart. There’s a sink full of dishes, piles of laundry (I’m not sure what’s clean and what’s dirty), recycling that dates back to January . . . and there’s a smell I can’t locate.
I wish I could just give myself a little grace when this happens, as it does every so often. I wish I could enjoy the “power of nothing” just because I can. But I’ve never been good at this. A cloud of self-recrimination hovers over my head just in my peripheral vision . . . and I imagine the word loser at its center in dripping font. Having been through a few things . . . it has never been my goal to survive so much as thrive. And even though I know, on a vague, cerebral level that there is something flawed in my thinking, I must always be doing . . . and not just being . . . I will not be defined. I will not be a victim. I will not make excuses to rest in average. And I will not be human.
Tell that to my body on a mid-Saturday morning as it’s coming up for air after a twelve-hour-exhaustion-induced-sleep-stupor. And all day Saturday, I couldn’t recover. I did nothing . . . and used up any small fragment of anything I had left hating myself. I would do better tomorrow, I promised myself.
So this morning, I congratulated myself on my burst of creative energy. I was hungry and I made myself a crepe. Yes, I know the ability to feed myself sounds less than impressive. But it was beautiful and unprecedented and unplanned, my crepe. I’d never made one before, but I had the memory of one I’d recently shared with my girls in a hidden little bistro in Chicago. It was made with fresh bananas and thick whipped cream and caramel sauce. I had none of these. I made mine from a recipe I’d found on Pinterest. It called for milk and sugar. I was out of those, too. I used heavy cream and powdered sugar, thinned it with some water . . . filled it with cream cheese and strawberry-jalapeno jam. It was beautiful . . . perfectly light and sweet and spicy. In fact, I was so inspired by it, that in my jubilation over it, I flung my entire cup of coffee across my living room. I lifted it happily and with fervor and it clipped the edge of my laptop (always close on stand-by), its contents sailing merrily out into the air and settling neatly down into my purse, my L.L. Bean workbag, several pairs of shoes that I had thrown off throughout the course of the week, all across my carpet, onto the Agricultural Science bunny named Iris that I adopted for the weekend, and down the wall on the far side of the room.
I sat there for the space of a second . . . empty plate in one hand . . . empty coffee cup in other, a little shocked and surveying the new mess I had just added to the existing mess. Iris stared at me, dripping coffee . I should have been further discouraged. I should have cried. I should have gone back to bed.
I laughed. Hard and hysterically.
Iris looked at me like I had lost my mind. And suddenly I was energized. I wanted to go for a run . . . drive to the grocery store . . . plan a trip to the mountains . . . pay bills and clean up my apartment. I wanted to wipe down iris. I wanted to feel the joy of the mundane and the unnecessary. Do more and be more . . . forgive myself for being human . . .
My little crepe was all the difference between a mess and a beautiful mess . . . It was borne on a spark that was bringing me back to myself . . . and the law that says that an object in motion stays in motion . . . after a long nap.
I think Iris forgives me . . . And so do I.
