There’s a picture in my head made up of words in the shape of a clock, or a circle. The words are ones I associate with myself, with who I am. This is the post I planned to write awhile ago, and it has been marinating ever since. I keep thinking the ideas will come together more coherently, but instead it remains the same as it was when I first came across the thought: a circular list of words. Some are big–bigger than I am–and apply only in a theoretical sense. I haven’t accomplished enough to claim some of them, but they’re not end-point words; rather, they’re associative, hopeful.

Writer. Mother. Chef. Photographer. Doula. Athlete. Friend. Partner. Family-member. Musician. Designer. Organizer.

I could add in a word related to doing laundry and dishes, but I don’t want to. I choose not to.

These words represent the ways that I use my time. Everything I’ve listed gives me pleasure or is something I want to pursue further.

(Which is why the chores get left off the list; yes, I use my time to do a lot of chores, but they’re not essential to who I am. Or are they? Probably they are. Probably they’ve taught me all kinds of good things about patience and persistence and the necessity and and meditative nature of routine. But I’d still let someone else take over the bulk of them, at least half the time, without blinking an eye.)

Thinking about these words gives me a way to consider what I’m doing, and what I would like to be doing. Which words are more ascendant within me right now? Or this week? Or this year? Or long-term? I have a lot of energy, now that I’m sleeping through the night, and when I set my mind to a task or a goal, I home in on it with laser-beam eyeballs and a focus that frightens me just a little bit sometimes. My question right now, having sent off my manuscript, and balancing on the cusp of who-knows-what, is where should I direct this focus? I am filled with ideas, and long-term plans and plots, but everything scatters like dust without concrete goals. Without placement.

The portrait project is a good example of something that has drifted, that, finished, feels a bit purposeless. I like a solid goal. I appreciated the challenge of taking a portrait every day, and appreciated everything I learned over the year. But. There it ends, a series of photographs, some quite lovely, some I’m happy never to see again, without any kind of summing up, without a home. What, I wonder, was the meaning of that? Could it add up to something other than the disconnected list that it is?

::::

In other news, my eye woes are mending. Not altogether healed, but improved. In fact, as soon as the gigantic pustules started shrinking–and even while they remained quite large and ugly-looking–I discovered an instant upswing in my confidence. The confidence was (and may very well still be) entirely out of proportion to the size of the pustules; the confidence relates, quite simply, to how bad it was before. Simple comparison. As long as it is better than it was, I am flying, I’m on top of the world, brimming with confidence. Plus, I have peripheral vision again, which is handy and quite useful.