reverb 10, days 4 & 5

I’m currently sitting in an apartment in San Francisco, visiting my dear friend (and cousin!) Kate. I’ve been mostly away from the internet since Friday afternoon, so I have two separate prompts to answer!

December 3rd: How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

I’m not sure I’m in the headspace to really talk about my sense of wonder right now. Or, maybe this is the perfect headspace. Right now, I feel sort of lead-footed and awkward, like everything I’ve been doing recently has caused me to crash painfully back to earth. It’s been and up-and-down sort of year, mentally speaking, and I’m hard pressed to come up with anything that constitutes “wonder.” That doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced wonder, of course, just that I have a hard time owning up to my own sense of wonder sometimes.

I worry far too much about what other people think of me. Sometimes, when I’m experiencing something that makes me feel wondrous, I hide some of that enthusiasm away, for fear it will make me look naive or silly or uneducated to someone else. But isn’t that what wonder is? Allowing yourself to feel like you’re experiencing life for the very first time? I love the feeling of discovering something brand new to me. A new album, a new TV show, a new book, a new friend … something that makes me feel like discovering everything about it, something that adds a dimension to my life that wasn’t there before. That’s wonder, isn’t it? But I hide part of my enthusiasm most times I do discover that feeling, for fear of getting a cynical reaction from friends and others. “Oh, you didn’t know about that before? I heard about it a year ago.” “Ugh, I didn’t enjoy that at all. The author sucks.” “Huh. I don’t really know about that person, they seem weird.” I need to learn how to ignore those kinds of reaction, to experience my own wonder in the way that makes me happy, without worrying about what other people will think of me because of it. Also, I need to learn how to embrace my own sense of wonder without needing someone else to validate that I’m right to love something … but that’s perhaps a different topic.

So, back to the original prompt. I let myself get excited and amazed by a few different things this year. I just wish I’d let those feelings continue longer, that I hadn’t let outside input dim my enthusiasm.

December 4th: What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

There are a million things I can think of that I needed to let go of, but didn’t. There are a few things that I let go of for a while, but that snuck back into my life in the last few months, for better or worse. There are things I want desperately to let go of, if only my own sense of obligation or guilt would let me. But, what did I actually let go of this year?

I let go of my need to wear full makeup every day. I’m still not sure if that was a positive change or not. Some days, it feels like I’m still super self-conscious about the change my glasses made in my appearance. You can’t see my eyes as well behind the lenses, so why bother wearing eyeliner any more? Another part of me couches it in better terms. I let go of needing to wear eyeliner and eyeshadow and blush and dark lip gloss every day because I finally realized that I can look relatively attractive in a semi-natural state. I only believe that on good days, though.

I let go of a lot of my fussy tics about my appearance this year. I let go of my need to have crazy colored hair that requires intensive upkeep. I let go of any attempts to wear anything to work but black slacks and t-shirts. I let go of my desire to wear boots and Converse sneakers everywhere I went – but that was mostly because a 6-week stint with a physical therapist for hip and ankle pain left me with a dictum to start wearing shoes with good arch support, or else.

The point is, I guess, is that I’d like to say I let go of my obsession with appearing a certain way. But that’s not always true. I still obsess about my looks all the time. I just get a ‘why bother’ feeling more often than not. That’s not really a feeling that lets me claim that I’ve given it up for noble sorts of reasons. How does one let go of their physical insecurities? I haven’t figured that out yet.

So, I don’t think I’ve let go of much of anything this year. That has to be a goal for 2011.