parotitis and me - we understand long incubation periods

Thanks for all the worried texts and calls about my ginormous gland. The swelling has gone down considerably, and I sleep on my right side quite comfortably again. All is right in the world.

I don't say that lightly, actually. I had a Friday epiphany, a culmination of years of thinking and thinking and thinking myself crazy, tired, and bored. Basically what it boils down to is that I know what I want out of life (as long as I remain single), and I know how I'm going to get it.

For awhile now, I've had no mental image of my future. It was blank. Somehow, not having vision for my future kinda sucked the life out of me. It wasn't that I was hopeless. I just didn't know what I wanted. Well, now I know. My home, the city where I live, my daily routine, my creative outlets, my participation in the community... it's all fallen into place in my mind. I see myself, what I'm doing, and I'm happy. I feel like a weight has been lifted, or like I've woken up from a coma.

The real epiphany was a psychological shift in how I see my career choice, that shift happening only after I discovered that I was living under a shell. The shell? Potential. It's such a vague and ominous word. I've been paralyzed by it. I can recount dozens of experiences, conversations, and moments that have thickened that shell of "living up to my potential." The fact is, nobody is ever living up to their potential... at best, we are becomming more of our good selves and less of our bad selves. It's never absolute. I'm never my potential. I never can be. Even so, I've struggled with choosing a career that meets my potential (how to gauge that, I don't know) that I can also enjoy. I'd never found an answer and so never did anything. And now here I am, under a shell that was thicker than it was last year... but now there's a giant crack in it, light is shining through, and I'm starting to peel back the pieces.

Nice imagery for spring.