I Take Notes

Lots of notes. At three in the morning when I can’t sleep, mostly. Which is often.

They’re good notes; profound, thought provoking, turn-them-into-a-project kind of notes. In the morning I stack them in a pile with every intention of giving them a go. They collect dust on my desk — fine, the floor next to my bed — and eventually I shove them in the back of a drawer somewhere. The thing is I have no direction, I’m indecisive, I am still learning the art of follow-through. And by learning, yes, I do mean I am utterly failing at it day-in and day-out and lets face it, nothing is ever going to be done with those notes.

I’m what the experts like to call a ‘Start-Up Leader’. All of my middle and high school teachers called it lack of discipline. My mother called it a lost cause. I’ve always been most fond of the experts anyway. We wouldn’t call them experts if they didn’t know more than Mom, after all. Just don’t tell my kids I said that. Or thought it. The youngest seems to have an uncanny knack for reading my mind and using it against me.

All of this to say, I have a house full of notes. In notebooks, on post-its, jotted on my hand and imprinted on my cheek after a particularly long night — notes! Also, a heart full of the best of intentions.

A few days ago I ran across a particularly large stash of those notes when cleaning off my desk. I know, I know. Who does that? It’s beyond me. I blame the winter weather, I was hoping a clean desk would upset the cosmos and bring spring. It didn’t work, in case there was any doubt, what with the record snowfall and howling winds.

Where were we? Oh, notes! You’ll have to forgive me, blogging only six times per year leaves a girl’s mad skillz a little rusty.

I found this stack of notes; tattered, smudged and stuffed in the very rear part of my desk drawer. I remembered writing them. At the time I was reading Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers. And, as you might imagine, thoroughly enjoying it.

Those notes are full of ideas; awesome ideas, some of which I own domains for. But what struck me most was not necessarily how terribly wasted those ideas had been when I stuck them in the back of the drawer without another thought, but how largely what was written on those notes are the same things that are written now in my mind. Not the specifics of course, but the general idea, no doubt.

The fact of the matter is I’ve had my fair share of suffering identity crisis after identity crisis over the years. Many of those have shown in my writing online and, of course, the numerous incarnations of different blogs I’ve called home. And yet here I sit looking over every note I could find after I stumbled across that first fateful pile and there is a clear trend throughout it all.

I was — am — so lost and yet, so very found. And that is a bizarre feeling.

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