The Girl I Was Too Lazy To Be Yesterday

First a few stats on the September issue of InStyle Magazine…..

638 pages

156 amazing pieces under $100

119 Pairs of shoes

94 Best new bags and boots!!!! (They had the exclamation points on the cover but come on boots Woo Hoo!!!)

It has been a slow summer.  I’m pretty sure I fell off the face of the Earth about May and I haven’t been able to pick myself up since August.  I would like to say that I have been on a mission of self discovery, but God if this is self discovery then I so need a refund.  In all honesty I haven’t been able to stand myself lately, and have felt something between being lost at sea and drowning all at the same time.  I have no excuses.  Actually I have lots of them but none of them are good enough to mention.

Last weekend I picked up the September issue of InStyle magazine and got to lay on the couch in utter silence and absorb all 638 pages.  While I plotted my assault on fall with the zeal of a military general, I came across an ad that said, “Be the girl you were too lazy to be yesterday.” 

At first I was offended and all those excuses that are not good enough to mention reared their heads in protest.  But….they all start with but.  But it’s the job.  But there’s not enough time.  But I have to clean the house and mow the lawn, and when do I get time for me.  By the time I had all those buts circling in my head I was so mad at the company that I vowed I would never buy a pair of shoes from the website.  How dare they tell me what I was supposed to be.  Let alone tell me that I had been lazy, the nerve.

But…..hadn’t I been lazy?  I started to wonder.  In the Spring I had passion.  I had a renewed sense of peace and a penchant for drive by gardening.  I had the peace of a glass of wine after work and just watching the world flow by.  I also had the determination to finish my first book, and the drive to start pounding away on the rewrites, but then it got hard.  The excuses started again.

 It’s not a good enough story.  Something isn’t right.  A lot of good it is doing me sitting in my dresser.  Wish I could fix it.  What if it isn’t even worth fixing? And the biggest most heart wrenching excuse there is, what if that is all I can do.  What if I had unwittingly wrote my own 867-5309?  Would I be destined to just have that lone unpublished manuscript sitting in my dresser?

So I got it out.  I read it.  Yes it had problems, and I had no idea how to fix them.  I spent the rest of the summer with it laid out on my desk and a legal pad full of notes on top of it.  I even started writing the second book, and stopped.  I stopped because I got lazy.  I stopped because I was afraid.  I gave up.

Here I was with a manuscript I didn’t know how to fix and an ad in InStyle magazine telling me to be the girl I was too lazy to be yesterday.  I’m still contemplating that ad, but I’m recovering. 

I’m finding that knowing with all your heart what you want in life requires more courage than one person should be able to possess.  That there is a fine line between giving up, and starting over, and sometimes the smallest steps make the biggest impact.

A friend of mine posted on Facebook today “the first step to beginning your journey is to find the path.”  I posted back that I was pretty sure mine began with yellow brick, and while at this particular time I feel more like the cowardly lion then Dorothy, I still am a firm believer in a killer pair of shoes.