“when your sparkle evades your soul”

There’s really nothing like being sick to knock you on your behind and make you feel useless. That’s where I find myself currently, as I got off work Sunday night, after spending most of my shift feeling awful, I got home and succumbed to a fever and congestion. This wouldn’t have been a big deal, except for the fact that I had been gearing up the week previously and into the weekend for an open call audition for season 2 of the The Glee Project out at McCormick Place on Monday morning. As I woke up that morning, having spent the previous five hours floating in and out of a fevered haze, I sat up and everything felt like it was spinning. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I also felt like I was hearing and speaking through a sheet of bulletproof glass, since my fever was accompanied by some terrible congestion.

At that moment, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. I was frustrated, angry, sad and, to top it off, sick. I hated knowing that, with this opportunity so close, I had to stop myself from going because of how terribly I felt and how going wasn’t going to improve my condition. I went back to bed and tried to sleep it off. Later in the day, I texted some of my co-workers about the situation because they were so excited for me and were extremely vocal in their support of me.  One of them replied back to me with this:

“Apparently there will be something better around the corner.”

Here was somebody looking at, as I saw it, a brick wall, and seeing an open window. It really made me feel better, not in a pander-y “what a nice co-worker” kind of way, but because I knew she believed it. There’s really nothing more affirming than somebody believing in you and what you can do.

I definitely feel like I’ve been lacking that in these post-graduate months. (Here’s a secret: it’s part of the reason for my hiatus). Two things would consistently get me down in these months since leaving DePauw: 1) seeing my friends go on to great pursuits, whether that was graduate school or jobs that utilized their particular skill sets and 2) getting trapped in how mundane my life had become, in a job that I know isn’t my career and not feeling like I was making any headway to get where I wanted to be. Of course, in a way, these two things oddly connected to one another and provided me with a little further hope.

Knowing that my friends and former classmates are out there living their lives with such vigor made me realize how big the world can be. Knowing how big the world can be is definitely a remedy to the mundane. I think part of the reason people get bogged down in the mundane is because of how limited their worldview becomes. I know I became really weighed down by the mundane when my only focus was on work; all I thought about was how small and insignificant what I was doing really was in the grander scheme of things. It wasn’t until I realized how limitless the world really can be that I stopped being, for lack of better terminology, a lame mope.

So, the next time you start feeling the heaviness of life bugging you, think of the amazing and open world that has been set before you and what you can (or need) to do to re-engage yourself with it. A dose of that will get you feeling right as rain before you know it.

I wonder if there’s a way to get something like that for physical ailings…

-MJH

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