30 days of self-love: new things

Trying new things is a beautiful way to love yourself. These days when I get that feeling in my stomach that tells me “Ah! I don’t feel comfortable doing that!” I make sure that I reflect, and if it’s because I’m nervous to be out of my comfort zone, because it taps into an insecurity I have in myself, I make sure that I do it. (IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN INTUITION. I honor my intuition. There is a difference between, “I don’t want to go to a writing meet-up where I don’t know anyone because what if they think my writing sucks,” and “I don’t want to continue doing this because what we’re doing in this moment feels wrong in every fiber of my body.”)

Today I went to a writer meet-up in New Orleans called Third Lantern Lit that I found on Instagram last week. And, of course, I was so glad that I went. At our core, at our most wanting, humans want to belong. We want community, we want connection. So finding something I’m passionate about and helps me better understand myself and the world (that’s writing for me) and combine it with community? Yes!

These things may seem like an “of course, why wouldn’t you?” It’s not always easy for me to push past that initial, “but what if…(insert potential disaster)?” though. So I say, how about, what if it all works out? That’s self-love for me tonight, trusting that no matter what, it will work out. I am a lovely person who can and does belong in many places.

I’ll leave you with a very short story I wrote, inspired by a post-it prompt I grabbed out of glass jar when I got to the meet-up. Meet Spider.

Sigh. October. I am a spider in the thick of the haunting season. You’ll be seeing me everywhere these days, on doors, windows, gates, tossed into stretchy white cotton. I am a creep, if you’ll believe what you see. So scary, scary, scary. 

I’m here to tell you the truth. I hate Halloween. I don’t know how I got here, but me and the black cat who lives next door lament how it gets worse and worse for us every year. I know, what a cliché. Imagine how we feel. The dread in my stomach grows as the days grow shorter and cooler. That’s how I know another season of misery is upon me.

Imagine if every time someone saw you, they screamed? Swatted at you? Said, “Ew, gross, smash it, quick!” Yet you are posted up on every other house as a symbol of the season. It’s a strange paradox I live, this infamous existence.

Look, I know that spiders can do some gross things, through a human’s eyes. Just this evening as I sat listening for the vibrations on my web of an impending meal, I heard someone talking about a movie they had seen at The Courtyard Brewery called The Beyond. “The spiders, they ate a man’s face. So disgusting!” She shuddered.

No one recognizes the good we do in this world. We help balance the ecosystem. We eat your household pests, including the real menaces: mosquitoes. I mean, not even the Dalai Lama likes them. 

I just wish people would take the time to get to know me. Don’t you see the magnificence I spin out of my butt? I can create a web that is STRONGER THAN STEEL. Come outside on a humid morning and tell me you haven’t seen something as miraculous as a spiderweb where the dew catches the light and glitters as if were a jewel made just for you in this moment. I am divinity. 

Yet to you, I am something to be squashed, a dollar store gel-hanging to be slapped up on a window in October, as a spooky creeeeeeepy-crawly. 

You humans like to say about yourselves, we’re more than our stories, we’re so many stories. We contain multitudes. Well, I am your mirror. I am of nature, and so are you. Get to know my story, get to know my magic. I am more than the cardboard cutout your child brings home from school.

I Am Spider.