feelings as big as the oklahoma skies
There's this great moment in Season One of Project Runway when Michael Kors looks at his judging card and says to a designer about her just awful sad mess of a design, "I wrote down farty."
That pretty well describes the past few weeks for me.
But wait, that's not fair. There is some good stuff, but my overall vibe has been just farty.
When Kyle was coaching, he used the phrase "in the tank" for years to describe an athlete who was just suddenly and inexplicably completely dejected. So much of athletic performance is mental, and sometimes the slightest bump just throws an otherwise outstanding athlete into the depths of despair.
Generally some kind of great public success could lure the athlete out of the tank, but more often than not, if things were going badly on the field, it was because of something off the field.
I can identify with that, though I am far from being an athlete. But every now and again, I find myself in the tank. The bump that caused me to stumble in is usually something petty and insignificant. Like, hypothetically speaking, after hearing over and over for several years that anyone can wear skinny jeans and ordering a pair and realizing that's one of the biggest lies ever told. I mean to say, that's just as an example that's how petty it could be. Or it could be the public recognition of someone else's success and facing the truest true truth that I'll never be what that person is. Or it could even be a brief illness, something as transient as a cold. And suddenly, everything is farty.
Especially me.
* * * * *
I get dozens of requests for Pinterest invites every day. Mostly people just say "Invite me" or some variation of that, but sometimes people write personal notes. A week or so ago, someone had come to SortaCrunchy for the first time to get a Pinterest invite and shared that we had so much in common, she couldn't believe I was real.
Oh.
I'm real.
And sometimes I think that's what pushes me into the tank - the realness of myself. The real is so heavy, so far from the floaty ideal I think I am. I feel clumsy and ache-y with the real. I feel so real, so impossibly, breath-catchingly real that I just can't stand to feel it anymore, and conjure some mystical numbness to cover myself in, and under that cover I slouch and hide.
* * * * *
But then, as quickly as the wind sweeps an Oklahoma sky free of clouds, I'm over it. I'm out and I'm buoyant and I'm back. I think I can say, right at this moment, that yes. The farty has lifted and things have re-centered and I shrug off the numbness.
And I carry on.
