evening thoughts

these words seemed to need to tumble out of me this evening...

thank you for being out there in the world and coming here to this corner and sharing pieces of you (and seeing pieces of me)

in the video, i mention the emerge e-course that is coming up next month and the podcast i did with kimberly wilson.

truths hidden in a saturday post

what would happen

where i stand . early july 2010

as afternoon began to fade toward evening, the thoughts tumbled a bit after two conversations with friends. because ellie was still napping, i came to my laptop and clicked to my email and read the nicest words about me and my work from someone who doesn't even really know me and then i felt tears tap the back of my eyeballs. 

because this is what i know: even when life is full of the "oh my goodness things are crazy around here" kind of stuff, it is full of so much beauty. 

but the only way i can see the beauty is if i give myself the space to see myself.

and then some words began to rush together in my mind, so i turned on the microphone to catch them (for you...for me).

(just click "what would happen" below to hear this audio post)

what would happen

hello seventh-grade self

Over here in my corner this week, I am becoming friends with my seventh-grade self.

As I sit here in my little house as Ellie Jane naps, I am thinking about how the Internet is such a distraction and such a gift. But when it distracts, it can really knock me into a dark part of my corner where I am no longer thinking about the light.ness or how my corner sings, but am instead sitting inside fear and envy and deep hurt. It is funny how I can let this little box that sits in front of me have so much power…it is funny how I can feel like I am right back in middle school as I click from link to link. Because of the Internet, there are so many things we can experience that are not so helpful or healthy, such as:

Experiencing an unfriending
Feeling like a fly on a wall when reading unkind things about ourselves
Wishing our life looked like someone else’s
Thinking that a blog post represents who someone really is
Gossiping about someone’s new creative adventure/endeavor
Comparing ourselves to people we have never even met
Comparing ourselves to our friends
Becoming a bit of a stalker as we notice someone who we thought was a friend comment on everyone else’s walls/blog posts/Flickr photos while we experience radio silence

I write these things knowing there is so much more to add to the list and knowing that even though I feel some shame at experiencing all these things myself, I am not alone in any of this.

Hello seventh-grade self.

One truth though is that I can control a lot of this. I can choose how I respond or how I spend my limited free time or where I go when I click from site to site. (There is so much we can control if we choose.)

And then there are the things I can’t control. I can’t control what others will say. There are the things I know about that become like a broken record in my head. (She is an amateur. Just look at her blog. Who does she think she is?) Then the things I don’t know about become empty balloons above people’s heads that I fill in with assumptions and fears.

Hello seventh-grade self.

And I appreciate the idea of “you just have to let it go,” because you can’t control it. You cannot know why people do what they do or say what they say. You are only in charge of you. (I am only in charge of me.) But that letting go thing is not always easy, and to be honest, when someone tells me to do just that, I often feel like they are dismissing the very real feelings I am having. And those feelings, although perhaps a waste of time, are real and swirling around inside me.

Recently though a friend challenged me in a different way. Instead of telling me to let it go or focus on how there is so much more good than not so good, she said something like this, “When you feel like you should go back and read those words, do something else.” She pushed me to see that my free time could be filled with “eating peaches” (oh how I love peaches) or resting or working on something good instead of trying to find out if people like me. (Okay, I added that last part, but I know that was what she was gently suggesting.)

I slept on it.

And the next morning I had this thought: Instead of wasting time on that “stuff” (the collective “stuff” that distracts me from making my corner beautiful), I am going to dance. Whenever the thought comes that I should to "click" to see if I am measuring up, I am going to stand up and dance, even if just for a second or two.

But before I could put this into practice, as Ellie took her morning nap, I found myself right back inside seventh grade.

(Sigh.)

At least I saw it happening this time.

And I decided to go into my folder of photos from my childhood to see if I could find my seventh-grade self. I wanted to have a picture in my mind to think about whenever this happened. As you probably guessed, there she is…right there at the top of this post. Doing the “Glee” thing (before Glee was cool) at a theatre summer camp in Wisconsin.

As I looked at this photo, I started thinking about my braces and the boy that I “liked” then (and wanted to “go with” not that we were going anywhere) and the pimples and the bad "oh my goodness why did she let me do it" perm. I started thinking about the not fitting in and the wanting to be someone else and the wishing my friends actually liked the real me who I was afraid to be a lot of the time.

And then all this collided with thinking about my decision to dance when I started to feel like I am not “measuring up.” And I looked at the next photo…

Oh. Hello seventh-grade self.

Hello girl who is so happy to be dancing and singing her heart out on a stage. Hello seventh-grade self (who lives inside me even now) who didn’t care what one person in that audience thought about her because there was no place she would rather be than living in that moment, singing, and smiling so big inside she thought she could change the very world with that song.

Hello seventh-grade self.

It is good to be spending time with you again.

let's throw open the windows (in your corner)

your corner (jan 3) from liz lamoreux on Vimeo.

earlier today, i had the desire to continue the conversation about how we can focus on our own corners and make them beautiful. (visit this post from last month to watch the first [much shorter] video about this idea of letting go of focusing on everyone else's corner and spending time on our own.) this video is a bit longer than i planned (you will understand why a few minutes in), but i just felt moved to share some thoughts that came to me today...

(so you might want to settle in with a cup of tea for the next 12 minutes [or bookmark this to come back later]. if you know me, you will nod when i say that this video really is a bit like having tea with me in this little house of mine.)

and my hope is that we can continue to have this conversation here. i plan to post on this topic every now and then as a reminder to me...to you...that we can work on our own corner so that we can be even more present to share our work (our stories) with the world.

*****

if you feel like sharing your response to my challenge in the video, i would love to hear from you. feel free to email me or share a comment here or maybe you will even share some thoughts on your own blog and let me know. i am really drawn to the idea of how the simplest of prompts can push us to think about who we are and where we stand on our paths. simple is good sometimes. especially when life is full full full and the time for one's self feels a bit non-existent. and taking the time to see yourself (even in small ways like i mention in the video) is a way to remember you in the midst of it all. 

*****

PS and anyone who lives in the seattle/tacoma area who wants to come over and help this "living inside what is real" new mama continue to regroup the world that is the little room so she can actually work in her studio? well, oh my goodness you are so invited over. tea + cookies will be provided.

PPS oh and more soon on the goodness that arrived by post.