Just start.

I waltzed around with this blog for days looking for the right tone, the right intro, obsessing about the banner (although I do think it turned out pretty good. . . .) and basically just waiting for Perfection to graciously alight her smug little Glenda the Good Witch self on my laptop, tap the screen with her glittery wand and poof!  There would be my blog. 

Hard to believe, I know, but that didn’t happen.

Sadly, much of my life has been spent this way, hoping to burst forth from the womb fully formed with no pain, no birthing goo, no red wrinkled skin or soft-skulled cone head.  On some level I know that this is completely unrealistic, and so I remain eternally pregnant, with all of the attendant discomfort and crankiness you might imagine that state would entail.

I’m not exactly sure where this spontaneous birth scenario originated.  I do know that early on, schoolwork came very easily for me and I never got anything below a B.  This was pretty much a parental expectation since valedictorian and salutatorian siblings had come before me.  But then, in seventh grade, the unthinkable happened. 

I got an “F”.

“F” as in failure.  As in flabbergasted and fear.

Also as in flounder, which I did through four more grades and two years of college, through french and history which I loved, and algebra and chemistry which I loathed.  Honestly, it did not register to my 11-year-old self that from that point on I might actually have to work at what I had sailed through with very little effort previously.  If I had reached the limits of my innate intelligence, then there wasn’t much to be done.  Though I heard plenty of “you can do better than that,” I didn’t believe or understand it and part of me took it as an insult.  I suspect that I interpreted “trying” as a weakness, but there was no such thing as self-awareness for me then.  Unable to articulate my perceptions, neither could I contradict them. 

In the classic documentary Hands on a Hardbody, contest winner Benny Perkins says (convincingly) that there is also great value in losing.  “Because at least they tried, and there's not too many triers in the world today. There's not that many people that are willing to take a risk." 

This is why I decided to start this blog—to document the evolution of my imperative desire to take risks, to become a “trier”.  It is also Step One in my not-so-master plan to do so.  

My water finally broke.  It’s time.

Just start.