If you haven't guessed by now, I'm less than thrilled by disruptions in my status quo. Translation: not too crazy about change. From what I eat for breakfast (Frosted Mini-Wheats with fruit is the standard these days) to the route I take to work I tend to stick with patterns of behavior longer than Neil Diamond has been singing Sweet Caroline. This personality trait works well if your husband is answering questions about you on a game show ("I'll take 'What she wears to bed' for $200, Alex") but is decidedly troublesome when one is trying to re-invent oneself.
That's why I'm grateful that God takes a hand in situations that get away from me. Whenever I don't have the courage/intelligence/decisiveness to pull the trigger and move on from something that isn't working in my life, He seems to step in and make the decision for me. Take last week. I had been struggling for awhile with the writing assignments I'd been getting from the online educational website that had hired me to write video scripts. The job was never a perfect marriage of my skills to their needs but I spent a lot of time, often way too much time, trying to adapt my style of writing to theirs. For awhile, I seemed to pull it off. They were happy with what I was doing and I was thrilled to be paid for my words; it was especially gratifying to actually see my writing turned into two-minute videos on the site. But lately, things weren't working. No matter what I tried to write, I couldn't find the right tone, the right pop-cultural references, the right humor/slang/puns to satisfy my editors. I wasn't enjoying the process anymore; no, scratch that, I was dreading the idea of sitting down and coming up with material that was no longer knocking their socks off and wasn't even remotely satisfying to me as a writer.
That's where God stepped in. While I couldn't (or wouldn't) tell my boss (who also happens to be my nephew who recommended me for the freelance opportunity) that I wanted to move on, I continued to work for hours trying to please someone other than myself. I didn't want to disappoint my nephew or have it reflect badly on him that his crazy aunt had run out of gas. I didn't want to disappoint the website who had hired me and given me my first writing income in years. And, most importantly, I didn't want to admit that I couldn't bend and twist my writing ability to fit into the website's very specific mold. So, when my nephew had to reluctantly inform me that the site wasn't "digging" my latest efforts, I was initially crushed. How dare they break up with me before I had the nerve to break up with them? But, you know what? That feeling was quickly replaced with waves of relief - real, honest-to-goodness relief.
I wouldn't have to come up with a silly pun or conjure up some potty humor that would make a twelve year-old chuckle. I wouldn't have to wrack my fifty-something brain to suggest a relevant pop-cultural video image that wouldn't leave a high-schooler scratching his head (can I help it if they don't know Paul McCartney isn't just some old guy singing at the Super Bowl?). And, more importantly, I wouldn't have any excuse not to get back to the writing that means something to me.
So, it turns out that that amazingly wise woman Sheryl Crow was right. If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad AND a change will do you good.
Now why can't I write shit like that?
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