May 23rd, 22:45 | Not that I'd ever call myself an "artist", but...

Every year for... awhile now, the past five years at least, I've written somewhere -- in a diary, in my blog, on a napkin -- some variant on "This Summer Is Going To Change My Life". This year, the statement can't help but be true; I'm uprooting myself and following -- for only the second time in my life that I can remember -- an impulse that most logic and reason warn me against. It's both a good feeling and completely terrifying.

Part of my decision to embrace, for lack of a less DirtyHippie word, this impulse, however, has been my decision to trust my intuition more, to try to listen to myself. This has been the biggest theme of my life for the past year, or two years -- spanning my frustration with myself and my lack of direction towards the end of my degree, the roiling mess of turbulent emotion, and bad decision-making the summer after, my immediate and poorly-thought-out enrollment in classes again, so that I might try to apply to a pharmacy school in the States (did I ever even apply? no), my desire to find and enjoy my own sexuality for me, and the frustration that led to, my turbulent fights with myself about whether or not to stay in my job at Workplace.

I need to time out here to warn all y'all that if you don't believe in the holistic self, if you don't really attach much credence to the thought that spiritual truth is related to You, as a person, knowing and being the completest self that you can be, you should pretty much skip this entry. I mean, you can scroll down to the last paragraph for a quick update if you're curious, but otherwise, this is going to come across as so much hippie mush. So.

Right. So the past couple years have been mostly about me thrashing around in my life, completely unable to figure anything out, and simultaneously criticizing myself for it, and trying to tell myself that it was okay so long as I learned something out of the mess. I think I have, small things. My understanding of yoga has deepened ridiculously in the past year. Part of it was the bursts of regular practice (note: I am totally not mid-burst right now), but part of it was finally achieving the Not Setting Goals part which is so important, the learning to Just Be in the practice. The other thing that finally clicked is the sameness of yoga's path with the one I found the start of when I was 15 or 16, in highschool, and much surer about who I was, and where I wanted to go.

Sometime in my second-last year of highschool, I finally wrote off all the readings I'd done, I tossed all the religions I'd been wading through and dabbling in. With all their glorious, detailed differences, the path they showed was essentially the same, and it held the same flaws, and I was tired of it. I took the path, borrowed and patch-worked from a whole mess of beliefs and mapped out what I thought was the right way, even though I never successfully found the right words to express it to anyone else. (This may or may not be because I never tried.)

Today, because the library finally got its ass in gear, I picked up a copy of The Artist's Way (a handbook on nurturing and unleashing your own latent creativity, basically) and started reading it. To my surprise, the Hippie Manual (as I'd mentally dubbed it when I put it on hold) is actually not an airy-fairy essay on self-realization and other such crap. It's an honest-to-god 12-week course, complete with readings, assignments, and "you had better do these two things, if nothing else, or else you're missing the whole goddamn point" exercises to be maintained for the 12 weeks at a minimum.

My logical, skinny-glasses-wearing, schedule-toting side is telling me that this summer is the worst possible time for me to take on something like this, no matter how good it would be for me: I can't afford half an hour every morning to just write 3 pages of Absolutely Anything before I start my day (proof: I can't haul ass out of bed for yoga either), and I definitely don't have 2 hours a week for self-indulgent Me Time. I know I don't, the messy-haired, mismatched-socks-wearing proto-me replies, I never do. I never will. So if I'm going to burn out and fail anyway, why wouldn't I do it this summer? If I don't let myself be happy now, then when; if not now, when? So I'm starting tomorrow (I'd just gotten home from tutoring; I was in no mood to do readings) and I'm totally stoked about it. I admit freely that I'm always stoked for the first week or so when I embark myself on any new pilgrimmage, but I'm extra happy this time because this book, this path, it matches. It completely fits everything that I've been slowly finding words for since my second-last year of highschool, and it's completely in keeping with every tiny, tremulous step I've taken in the past two years.

So, three months from now, I'll likely not be much different on the surface; I'm sure everyone will tell me, as they have been for the past two years, that I never change. But I'm sure I will; I know I have. I'll know. And that's all that matters.

On a non-hippie note (no seriously!) I have the good news to report that My Lost Lonely Sock has been reunited with its Other. My mom found the Renegade Sock in a bucket and hucked it in the wash; they are now snuggling in my sock drawer, and I'm secretly hoping that while I'm not watching, they will be fruitful and multiply because, frankly, I could totally use more socks. But then, I always say that.

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