Yesterday, I started a piece about my day spent volunteering at the PAWS medical center on 26^th and Drake. It was going well, but as I was writing it, I realized that I was avoiding writing about the stuff that has really been bothering me. I was taking the easy way out by writing about shelter dogs because who doesn’t love a real Sarah McLachlan tear-jerker post mid-week?

I also realized that I was writing about shelter dogs because helping helpless animals is something I can do. I have control over it. I can leash them, walk them, feed them, clean up their endless piles of poop and occasional piles of puke, look into their terrified eyes and tell them that they are loved. I can rub their bellies and stroke their soft ears and squeeze their little paws and use my calmest teacher voice to tell them that everything is going to be ok. That they are safe. I can even run miles and miles for them and ask people for money to help them – yes helping shelter dogs is my jam, but writing about them is a cop-out.

Maybe I am being too harsh, but probably not. I’m turning my critical eye on myself and teaching myself the hard lesson. How many times have I told a student “It’s good, but it’s not great.” Or “what is this paper trying to be about?” “What are you avoiding? What are you afraid of? What is the hard thing?” I tell my students to run toward that thing. Sit with it, think about it, write about it – make sense of it. What bothers you? What can you not stop thinking about? What makes you angry or sad or gleeful? What moves your soul? That is where you will find your essay. That is how you’ll write something worth reading.

That is not to say that shelter dogs don’t move my soul. They sure as hell do, or wouldn’t be devoting so much of time to them. But they are not the grain of sand in the oyster of my mind.

Last year, when I started this blog, I was like a puppy let out of a cage (I know, I know – I couldn’t resist). I was bounding through my life with purpose – hopeful, gleeful, unsure where I was going but caring very little for the destination because I was on a journey. I was running up to strangers and into opportunities and, occasionally, into traffic. That kind of joy is infectious and self-replicating, and nothing could stop me – not a mediocre date, fizzling relationship, or unreturned text message. Have you ever seen a puppy get knocked over? What does he do? He jumps up and keeps running with wild abandon. That was me.

I was writing my face off, publishing articles in an online magazine, talking to everyone, dating in real life, and carrying on a pseudo-relationship with a man who was thousands of miles and oceans away.   I went back to work and was doing all of this while working full time. I bought a condo, moved across the city, took a class, told a story live, taught dance, and I tried to maintain the unmaintainable. Did you ever see a puppy when he’s run too far and too long? He gives up. He plops his little furry butt down, and refuses to move until a big strong human scoops up his little warm body and carries him home.

When you’re a thirty-five-year-old professional woman and not a puppy, there is no one to scoop you up and carry you home when all you want to do is plop your butt down. In fact, I’m not exactly sure when I wanted to collapse in a heap or when I realized my joy ride had lost momentum and well – joy.

If I really think about it, I must admit that there was not a single moment – more of a slow and gradual slide away from what motivated me to embark on this adventure in the first place. Last week, I got into an Uber and I thought, “Oh great, I can use this 15-minute ride to catch up on swiping on Bumble,” and that’s exactly what I did. A few days later I recollected that ride and thought “that is not who I want to be.”

A few days ago, my mom sent me an article about how young people are “ghosting” on job interviews the same way they ghost on dates or nascent (or even established) relationships. Before I even read the article, I texted her back “that doesn’t surprise me, people are the worst.” Who writes that? I thought. People are not the worst. I don’t believe they are the worst – but something about the way I’ve been living recently pushed me to that immediate reaction.

Perhaps it’s the three men I’ve given my number to on online apps – none of whom actually texted me, and you can just forget about calling, why would anyone use a telephone for such a thing? Perhaps it’s the two men who asked me out for drinks last week and then never followed through. Perhaps it’s the man who, in response to my picture on Potato Chip Rock in San Diego wrote, “For lack of a better phrase, I have to say, you must have huge balls.” Why he might think that I would ever want to talk to someone who lacks a better phrase than “huge balls” when speaking to a woman is beyond me.

Yes, perhaps it is some of those things. Likely, it is all of them. But then, there are the things I have done because a year ago I decided to live differently. There’s the fact that after years of saying I would, I finally did start volunteering at PAWS. There’s the fun run/happy hour I went to tonight by myself where I talked to a dozen strangers. Or the half marathon kick-off party I went to last week and did the same thing. There are the hands I shake, the eye contact I make, the smiles I flash, and the connections I make simply because I taught myself to live differently.

My struggles often feel inadequate. My life is beautiful and rich and full. I shy away from writing about the trials and tribulations of my dating life because a little voice inside my head says, “Kathleen, people have real problems. They are fighting cancer, or their children are sick, or they’re struggling with their marriages, or their parents are ill. You can’t go on a decent date? No one cares. Another guy disappeared? So what.”

Then I remember that there are people who care and that the subtitle of this blog is “A Personal Journey.” I remember that T.S. Eliot wrote of his masterpiece The Wasteland that it was “only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life…just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” I’m no Eliot, but this blog is, in effect, my personal and wholly insignificant chronicle, and the beauty of the personal is that it becomes universal. When we write what is personal, we write the hard thing. We write the thing that hurts, that nags, that brings us pain and joy, and when we do that – we write something worth reading.

Until next time…