Tag Archives: about-me

motivational

More than you think you are

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On the internet, you can be anything you want to be. It’s exactly what makes Brad Paisley’s song “Online” so humorous and true. I could tell everyone that I make thousands of dollars from home, have a weekend cabin in the mountains, and my husband works for Britney Spears.

However, NONE of these things are true.

As I skim through web-sites of various people, I find myself wondering on occasion how truthful are the things I am reading. Especially when the site is void of direct links or photos of the claims. Claims such as being published in countless magazines and on countless sites. Claims of meeting and interviewing celebrities. Claims of making thousands of dollars without even trying.

I ultimately wonder if the person is claiming to be more than they truly are. Many of the claims are laughable enough that you know inherently they are not true. However, in this more-is-better world, I also wonder if exaggerating claims is the only way people can be taken seriously. Its something that perpetuates and justifies the lies told in flashy sites and pretty words.

This leaves me overwhelmed and confused on how to proceed for myself. I never want to be anything but truthful in all of my endeavors. I fear sometimes the truth could end up undercutting my potential, because the truth is so often black and white, with no shades of gray. Then I remember:

Linen PortraitI am more than I think I am.

I am the sum of my successes and my failures. I am my family and my friends. I am my experiences, my beliefs and my faith. I am honest. I am confident. I am scared. I have a lot to give, and I’m working to make my own opportunities to do just that.

So what if on paper, in black and white, I haven’t had anything published in a few years. It doesn’t make me any less qualified to be a writer. So what if I don’t hold a degree in graphic arts or creative writing or web design. It doesn’t make me any less capable of experimenting in all of these categories. So what if I never took a photography class. I have a Flickr account full of good photos that I’m proud to share with others.

July has been a rough month for me, and we’re not even half-way through it. I’ve lost a beloved pet, and a couple years of financial stress has finally caught up with me tenfold. Its all left me with a few cracks in my confidence of self, but my determination has doubled. Something that I think will carry me through. Something I KNOW will carry me through.

I’ve never been someone who gets knocked down for long. I assess a situation and proceed in ways I feel to be most logical and that will provide the greatest success rate. I’m not afraid to work. Just the opposite. I like to work. I just firmly believe you should always try to work smarter.

Life’s not black and white; there’s always more to the story. It’s precisely what I love about writing — finding the story behind the cold hard facts. I’ve been giving myself pep-talks the last couple of days, reminding myself there’s more to my own story…

There’s more to everyone’s story, and there’s no need to embellish it. Just be honest with yourself and your peers. Believe in yourself, and your success will happen.

about-me, ironic musings

Night owl

Its 4 am.

Yes, you read that right. 4 am. This is not an unusual hour for me. It’s about bed time, I suppose, and I write this from my bed. Quality time with my blog tonight, I guess you could say.

I’m a night owl. I am sure many people think this fact is due to my having married a musician who is, by profession, a night owl himself. However, I think a big part of why my husband and I ever hit it off is the simple fact that I’ve pretty much always been a night owl.

I remember back in Elementary school, I was baffled about how none of my classmates knew that at 10:30 pm, after the news, M*A*S*H came on for half an hour. Bed time was always after that show, of course, but it was perfectly normal for me to stay up to watch the show!

My classmates were all in bed by, I assumed, 8 or 9 pm. Me? I’d be up until 11 pm, mostly because there was no point to my going to bed any earlier. I wasn’t going to sleep anyway!

In high school, I was introduced to After MidNite with Blair Garner while I did homework. IF I was done with my homework, I’d still lay in bed awake until all hours listening to the radio host’s antics. If there was an artist I was really interested in being interviewed, I’d be awake until 3 am easily… waiting to hear the interview.

Now, all this being said, I’ve never been a morning person. I can remember in Elementary school, I’d get up and have cereal for breakfast. I’d build myself a fort out of cereal boxes around my bowl in an attempt to keep the light out. I already didn’t think the day should even consider starting before 10 am. At the earliest.

Somewhere along the way, I learned how to live on about 4 hours of sleep. I did that through most of college. Go to bed around 3 am. Get up by 6 or 7 am. Drive to 8 am classes. I kept this schedule up into my job at a newspaper… staying up late, though, to talk to a guy instead of to do homework.

I married that guy.

I moved to Nashville.

My night owl-ness got worse.

You can ask most of my friends here in Nashville. This fact is not unusual. It’s almost a, “Welcome to Nashville,” phenomenon.

However, its not when we go out, or if I pick up a night working downtown at the bar, that my being a night owl takes a ridiculous turn. While I’ve driven home from downtown while the sun rises, its actually when my husband goes on the road that I stay up super late. You see, sunrise offers me some sort of strange security blanket. Its like the first rays of light bring with them this sense of safety. Like I can relax and go into that vulnerable sleep-state.

I sleep as the sunrises. I wake as most go to lunch. Some days, I wake as the school bus drops off neighborhood kids. I have coffee and cereal, as they have candy bars and cokes. This is normal for me.

I try hard to adjust my schedule from time to time. I miss daylight, and I force myself up by 10 or 11 am. However, I often still stay up late after that… and I find myself sleeping even later than normal the next day to compensate! Its at times like that, that I realize that sometimes its not worth fighting the body’s natural clock. I’ll fight it when we have kids. For now, I’ll just stay a night owl.

It is what it is. And what it is now… bedtime.