On occasion, I experience insomnia. This isn’t anything new. When it first started happening to me as a teenager, I would get out of bed, head to the kitchen, pour myself a bowl of cereal and sit on the couch watching black-and-white reruns of Leave It to Beaver or The Andy Griffith Show with the volume all the way down, so I wouldn’t wake my dad or brother (who were lucky enough to still be sleeping).
When this happens now, after begging sleep to kindly return (and it not answering my plea), I reluctantly get up and do things I always say I’d like to do “if I could only find the time…”
Time has a way of finding me.
And then I get to find myself.
In the hours when my house is quiet, but my brain is most definitely not, I just start.
I start reading books of short stories. I start writing poetry. I start writing snail-mail letters. I start making a list of items I need to buy at the grocery store for a new soup I want to make. I start heating water for my tea. I start painting with scissors and glue, letting collages take shape.
I also start daydreaming middle-of-the-night-while-awake dreaming about ideas that, while I don’t know it at the time, lead me to places I never knew I’d end up.
For example…
I didn’t know that writing a newspaper article as a stringer would lead to me writing lifestyle cover stories. I didn’t know that starting a pet sitting business would lead me to working for the nation’s largest no-kill animal sanctuary. I didn’t know that buying rose quartz in a tiny shop in Arizona would lead me to opening my own health and wellness store. I didn’t know that messaging my then-boyfriend one morning in June and asking what we should do on that gorgeous, sunny day would lead me to eloping with him that afternoon. I didn’t know that letting my fingers massage the keys of a vintage typewriter would lead me to writing my first published book.
It’s 3 a.m. as I write this. In the hours that insomnia allows me, I find myself…going who knows where?
I just start here. And hope that, when I’m gone, should anyone find a trace of me, they won’t wonder who I was or where I was going (because I never really knew), they’ll just know: There She Woz.
Loved hearing your voice Woz! Sending you❤️
Loved this so much. Loved learning more about you!