So, Em, what do you want?
The question arises year after year and I've become quite gifted at slighting my discomfort by dropping emails of things on my "wish list" to my parents and grandparents throughout the year. The email I sent my mom last week doesn't feel so awful to say... "hey, I think this Lilly Pulitzer dress is whispering to me. It's saying it would like to make an appearance at my graduation in May...oh, and it's on super sale right now, I'd wear a size 6. Love, Emily" This just means 1. I can't give into instant gratification for everything and 2. I've gotta remember to send those succulent emails through the interwebbs so I'm not pinned down by a late-November request for a list and 3. Learning to dispel concerns about making note of Christmas-related items in August ranks on my lengthy list of "reasons I have a therapist."
You can probably guess by now that I'm not here to cry my woes about the materialism of Christmas in my family...though I totally could. It's that question: what do you want? --replied to with that answer: Sweet Jesus, I DON'T KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!
Welcome to my favorite sitting place with a recently found unfavorite stinking question. It's a freaking dandelion of a question, popping up exactly when and where you'd expect it to but you never have a solution, or not yet. The hilarious part about this is that I'm the one who lovvveeeesssss blowing the fluffy dead dandelions. (fun fact: I didn't realize these were dead dandelions until about two years ago when my dad pointed it out. I feel my IQ dropping rapidly) When I blow the dead ones, I'm letting the mutant dandelion seeds fly into the world to create further cesspools of dandelions. My father has yet to truly convince me that dandelions aren't flowers. They are my favorite color and, as a child, I would pick them in bunches from a hill down my street and decorate my bicycle spokes and my hair and still have enough to squeeze against the white (until yellowed by dandelion juices) handlebars of my super cool pink sparkly bike as I paraded through the neighborhood. Gosh, I love metaphor.
I love and find purpose for dandelions even though my parents pulled me away saying "they're just weeds" as they gunned down the blooms with weed killer. I also love questions that I can't answer in 1.3 seconds, questions that melt in my mouth and get my to tip my head back with closed eyes. More often than not, I'm the one who picks these dandelion questions from the field of wildflowers.
What do you want...from this conversation...from this therapy session...from this internship...from this relationship...this blog? I still get the queazy, guilty, selfish feeling with these questions. There's something inside me saying "you should be happy with whatever you get"yet there's a conflicting yet comforting voice saying "you deserve to be fulfilled and people deserve to know how they can help." And that's where I get stuck. I have an idea of what I want but the words just don't come out. I'm afraid I want too much or not enough or that the person/situation won't be able to give it to me. I keep it simple saying "I'd like a box of crayons and a coloring book this year" instead of telling my grandma that I've been dreaming of learning to paint and would really love to take a painting class with my dad.
I don't have a take-away for you today--unless you are cool with taking "Emily lives not he struggle bus too" as today's dirty, honest truth. Super honestly: when I started blogging again last month, two friends asked me how I felt about it and I said I was struggling because I didn't feel like I had a purpose for it, there was no cohesive fiber (besides myself) tying it together and I didn't know what I wanted that fiber to be...still don't...
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