I've been thinking a lot lately about ability, and capability. Every now and then I like to regroup and "praise the baby step," a phrase I just coined about 20 seconds ago. Over the summer, I took a lot of big giant ogre steps. Plane rides, train rides, asking my brother in law to give a cute boy my number for me (okay, okay, that last step could have been bigger but WHATEVER). Then autumn hits. And don't get me wrong, autumn is my most favorite, but school started, work got more hectic, and I started having more responsibilities than I could shake a stick at. A STICK. So, not a lot of room for ogre steps. No big trips by myself. No courting Disney boys. No making my brother-in-law court Disney boys for me.
I have been doing more moping than I would like to admit, so I won't admit it (it's been a sizable amount of moping, btw), over my "lack of progress," or lack of pushing myself, or lack of kicking butts, or lack of kicking my own butt, though that last one is physically difficult so I will cut myself some slack there. So now, when I sat myself down to write this post (I'm actually laying down, but the phrase "lay myself down" sounded a little more seductive than I wanted it to, honestly) and felt a gnarly little whine creeping from my fingertips, I thought, "WELL, HEY. LET'S PRAISE THE BABY STEP."
The baby step doesn't get much credit, though when babies take first steps everyone absolutely flips their hypothetical lids. When we pseudo-adults take baby steps though, no one's impressed, and because no one's impressed, we don't feel that encouraged, or good about our achievement, no matter how baby-steppy or ogre-steppy it is. Today I just ASKED where something was in Joanne's instead of wandering around like a dumb, nervous ninnie. Last week, I went into a coffee shop I'd never been to by myself. At work today, I wrote well, and felt good about what I had written. Last week, I made the decision to look for spring internships to try and get myself out of the comfortable, albeit sort of simultaneously uncomfortably goopy, work rut I've fallen into. Tonight I admitted to a friend that a guy was not worth my time, because he was not acting like I was worth his, as much as it almost physically pained me to do so. I am friggin' teaching a group of high school kids who don't seem to think I am as lame as they think their parents are. I finally wrote a poem without a clear narrative. Last week I hemmed a dress, and wore the heck out of it the next day (and it didn't even rip). PRAISE THE BABY STEP. I want you all to praise your baby steps, because it's easy to forget that, when we're not leaping over pits of failures and self-deprecation, that we are still always making progress. So I will move these sometimes baby, sometimes ogre, feet, and feel proud of it, because I deserve to, and you deserve to, too.
A note about my clothes. I am wearing a bear sweater; it is my favorite. I am also wearing a very short skirt. Today I dropped something off of my desk and there was a near bottom flashing incident, but I played it cool, and probably didn't flash my young man coworker. Probably.
Until tomorrow,
Nicole
