But Maybe Wear a Helmet

There is something I have lost. Something that recently has gone out of my life. It is the something that lets me send words out into the world without care and with a sort of blind faith that somehow my fingers know better than my mind what needs to land on a page.

Thus, (to borrow a transition word from the list of transitions I gave to my 9th graders the other day), I haven't been writing much.

And for a couple months this was fine. I was busy. I was moving. I was teaching and going to school and applying for another teaching position and training for teaching online and getting sick every other day and THUS, thus- I left writing.

So now my fingers don't know quite what to do. They start. They delete. They second guess. They worry. They pause...

But today, well- today I was walking through my office at school, eyes glued to the assignment I was about to copy for the students restlessly awaiting instruction in the computer lab, when I slammed my leg right into a file cabinet with a noise that startled at least two of the three co-workers that were in the office at the time.

"Katie!" said one of these dear co-workers, "are you ok?!"

"Yeah," I replied, but in my head I thought no. No. Something is very wrong with this picture. What am I doing here? What has happened to my life? Obviously there is a reason my eyes have been causing me problems for the last two months. Obviously there is something I am not seeing.

"I'm fine," I said to my co-worker. "It sounded worse than it was." In my head, though, I was saying, "Nice job. How clumsy can one person be? Who runs into a file cabinet?" And a story a student wrote in a creative writing class I taught one year long ago came to mind, one that featured a teacher who tripped over cords and bumped into things. I sighed.

It wasn't until I bumped into my stove for the second time later on the same night that I thought of my blog, and the tagline about being clumsy and running into things in an adorable way.

Thus, now that I am sitting on the couch with my hound beside me, watching Julie and Julia and trying not to be envious of the blog writer in the movie who became successful by writing about recipes and cooking. I am thinking maybe I should stop being jealous of someone in a movie and start doing work of my own. I am thinking maybe I can be successful writing about collisions? Accidents? Embarrassing mishaps?

Since there is no telling how many embarrassing mishaps I will encounter in my life, no telling how many slightly painful collisions I will have, since I am bound to run into objects and people for the rest of my life, I might as well keep writing.

Thus, I might as well let my fingers run as they will.

And just wait to see what will happen next.

No pausing, no second-guessing. No more worrying.