Lately, I’ve been feeling like a pod person, just going through the motions. On the outside, everything looks normal. Someone tells a joke, I laugh. It may be a slightly hollow laugh, but it’s something. I am interacting socially. It is the in between moments, those times when I’m alone in the car or walking the building, when I’ll realize at some point in the middle of the activity that I am not thinking of anything. Those moments are full robot mode, like a switch has been pushed to the off setting. My brain is not churning with writing ideas. Memories that often play like out like movies are staying locked away in the filing cabinet at the back of my brain. I’m not mentally placing photos on walls or designing yoga classes. There’s no making note of the things I am seeing as I walk or drive by. It’s just an absence of all thoughts.

On top of the blank empty hole that is my brain, my body feels like it is on loan from the Pillsbury Doughboy. Michael got me an Anthropologie gift card for Christmas, which I’m usually quick to spend, but Ive browsed the sale items both in shops and online and left with nothing. I don’t want to even try on clothes partly because of the whole doughboy situation but also because it just feels exhausting to remove all the winter layers just to try on something that I probably won’t be happy with. There is nothing worse than standing in the cruel lighting of a dressing room and trying on a mini dress that fits me in weird places and not others, my winter white legs bouncing light off the mirror. I always leave my socks on in these situations and the whole half dressed, bare legs, with socks look is particularly sad, but I know if I want to get the most out of that gift card, I’m going to have to try on a number of items and chose wisely. Heaven forbid I spend it all on one full priced item.

Maybe in the Spring, when I can see colors again….

Saturday, Michael and I went downtown to check out the space where I will be hanging pictures in May and to eat lunch at new to us Korean place. We parked somewhere in between both places so that we had to walk over to the coffee shop and then back in the other direction to the restaurant. We didn’t spend a long amount of time looking over the wall space for the showing. I took some pictures of the walls and Michael and I sat with hot drinks while I contemplated what I might want to print. Since we had some time to kill before the Korean place opened for lunch, we strolled for a few blocks, looking into shop windows and speculating on businesses in the area. For the first time in a long time, I felt a spark and an urge to get my camera out. I even got into it and at one point had to tell Michael to wait. When he asked what I was doing, I said “I need to stand in the middle of the street for a minute.” This is nothing he has not heard before, but when I was finally back on the sidewalk I knew that I would have to visit this spot again. I took a good picture, but not a great better. That good picture reminded me that I can do better.

I want to do better.

There are moments where I am really trying to not be that pod person. I can still feel a spark to take pictures. I signed up for an aerial yoga class this evening to force myself into some hanging upside down play time. I plugged my ears into some dance party tunes and moved my body. And then I spent that gift card on singular, full price item.