Picking Through Pocket Lint Looking For My Lucky Penny

I am drawn to the past lately. I am pulled by it.



A friend told me recently that there is a particular planet that is in retrograde or transit or some such form of movement in its chorus with the other planets that is causing the past to rise up for everyone, and so we're all looking back at the past and turning it over and dredging up old feelings. There may be some truth in this.

I don't just remember the closet under my grandmother's stairs, the one that I used to crawl into so I could listen to the muffled voices of adults playing dominoes well past my bedtime. I can feel the rough synthetic chenille of the blue and white bedspread and the aged softness of the old cotton quilt whose stuffing always fell to one end. I can hear the amplification of my own breath against the wood panelling.

I am alive inside the memories that come back to me. I could write books detailing them. There would be no story, just a long string of vignettes, but maybe I could expunge them all, put them somewhere where they wouldn't keep popping up in front of me.

----------------------------

I said out loud tonight that I think I'm depressed. I've been thinking it for a while, but it seemed like a good idea to lay that one down with some weight out in the world.

I spoke in front of a room full of people all by myself recently. This was something I had on my life list, and it was something that I never really believed I would have the opportunity to do let alone be able to do it. I surprised myself, though, and pleasantly at that.

I was expecting to be a little bummed afterwards, because this is how success works with me. I reach a height, and then I stupidly lose faith for a while when a set of stairs to the next high doesn't immediately present itself. What I didn't expect, though, was to fall into the trap of self-doubt I used my TEDx talk to talk about.

I feel like I'm wasting time picking through pocket lint looking for my lucky penny.

----------------------------

None of this is to make you worry. It's a phase. I'm going through a phase.

We wake up cyclically. We wake up to things, we break a bit out of the monotony, the sameness of our lives and our thinking, occasionally, and it's not always fun. Sometimes it's bright and fresh and enlivening like breathing in crisp air on a spring morning, but sometimes it's really inconvenient and discomfiting and shakes our faith in everything just enough that it feels like our lives are held together with little more than papery, dollar-store tape and leftover yarn.

I'm at the papery tape and leftover yarn end of the spectrum right now. It doesn't mean that this is how things actually are; it just means that this is how things feel, which is why I am here in the middle of the night telling you all about it.

----------------------------

As a kind of comfort, I have been digging up small memories of things I particularly liked as a child. Here's one of them:

My father kept hockey sticks up in the rafters of the garage. He would lay them side by side across two unpainted beams. When no one was home, I would drag the folding ladder over and climb up just high enough reach the hockey sticks' blades. I used the blades to shuffle the sticks side to side just enough so that bits of wood and sweet, fine, winter dust would drift down to where I could smell them in the air. The dust hung there in brief puffs and made me feel like there was a mysterious history to discover in the world.

This memory just reminded me that I need more rituals that help me remember the feeling of mystery.

Now you with a small, good memory. Tell me one.

TEDx Talks: Elan Morgan's "Self-Doubt and the Power of Personal Narrative" at TEDxRegina

On May 16, 2012, I had the great opportunity to speak at TEDxRegina.



I have spoken on panels at blogging conferences before, but, until May, I had not stood in front of a group of people to speak alone since my grade 12 English class in 1989. I delivered that talk through two plastic spoons dressed in superhero capes while I hid behind the teacher's desk that I was using as a spoon stage, because public speaking is my greatest fear next to death.

Naturally, of course, I chose to talk about self-doubt, and the business of getting my talk together became a study in my own subject while I worried over images and the structure of my storyline. Working toward this TEDxRegina talk required me to call upon a level of personal fortitude I honestly wasn't sure I had, but it turns out now that I do, and it is this medium and so many of you over the last almost nine years that brought me here to this point where I can accomplish things I once had no faith I could accomplish.

Thank you.

----------------------------

PS. Here are the slides from my presentation by themselves: Self-Doubt and the Power of Personal Narrative

Grace in Small Things: Sunday Edition #99

1. Finding the above ridiculous photo that makes it look like my breasts are cats with which I am trying to impose breastfeeding on a third cat, which was not the intent of the photo at all
2. Guacamole
3. Crossing doing a TED talk off my life list
4. May long weekend!
5. Showering in the early morning with all the lights off and the windows wide open so I can kind of pretend that I'm outside while I do it like I'm in one of those old Irish Spring soap commercials:

Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things.

----------------------------

PS. I love the lengths they go to in order to prove the manly manliness of this soap. Not only do they show us shirtless outdoor wrestling and extremely hairy chests, but they also carve through the soap with knife. We can already see the colour variation in the soap, but he cuts through that mofo with a KNIFE. Men, this is your soap.