"Now she's out setting sail on the ocean of the soundtrack"

I do some of my best writing at folk shows.  (as well as making excellent progress on cross-stitch things.)    Tuesday night, I went to a Redbird show with Light, and in addition to drafting this entry,  decided to write down a lyric that struck me from every song sung and ended up with a neat little found-poem.
 

I'm going to the island this weekend and my imagination is failing me.  I've never done something this intentional, this discussed.  I'm ludicrously pleased with myself and I'm pretty sure it's going to be awkwardly awesome and everyone will figure out where to put their hands eventually.   I am, it turns out, still able to imagine disasters that could happen, but I just keep telling Feste and/or Light about the scenarios I imagine and they keep telling me "that's probably not going to happen".   (and I'm almost okay with the uncertainty.   I'm feeling so resilient that I'm actually a little freaked out about my own calm).  So, we'll see.
 

(on the whiny front, I have the worst timing in the world.  First I had a couple skin tags removed, and the doctor ended up using silver nitrate, which stains skin black so I look like I have some weird-ass disease. Just what you want before (possibly) getting nekkid with someone for the first time (I don't want to presume.  I certainly hope to get nekkid)). 

I read two books back to back on vacation, and there's something in the overlap that feels revelatory.  (well, I read three, but the third's about kink and this journal is not the place I work that out).   The books were Quiet by Susan Cain and Attached by Amir Levine & Rachel Heller.  For the record, I was embarrassed to be reading Attached on the bus, I'm not sure why a self-help book should trigger such shame, but it did.   It's a quick book, an over-simplification of attachment styles, with a  frosting of crazy obvious victim/villain narrative.    Quiet,  on the other hand, felt well-researched and initially I was concerned it would be yay!introversion boo!extroversion, but it didn't feel like it went there.  This was more like a comforting person saying "it's okay and makes perfect sense that your reactions are Y, even if everyone else's seem to be X" and feeding me cocoa and cookies
 

To oversimplify, both basically said (to me) identify your needs and own them, and if you do so, you can be even awesome than you already are. And both the narratives, introvert vs extrovert, anxious vs secure/avoidant, are things I've struggled with for years.   I've usually thought I'm too much, that I want too much reassurance, that I want my conversations to be too serious, that I'm being theatrically jumpy in crowds, that my need is so much as to be unsatisfiable and I should get all these things under control, stop bothering the nice people and be a grownup.
 

But maybe I just don't function well in crowds or other high stimuli situations and that's fine too.  Maybe if I get all the reassurance I need, I can then start being calm about things and my calm is a powerful force for awesome.   And there's this balance I'm trying to find, the point between not trying to be something I'm not and continuing to grow.   I'm not sure where it lives, but it seems like if I do less of the former, I might be able to figure out how to do more of the latter.
 

I don't know how to keep this feeling, I'm afraid of strangling it, of jarring it.  Maybe this all depends on not hanging up the clean laundry, or not actively working on a convention, or something even less reproducible, like the size of Tanning or the weather.   Or worse still, it's the specific combination of Light and Feste and the size of the kitten and some other thing completely beyond my ability to control or even predict.    

Whelp.  I guess I'll have to see where this thing goes.  All signs point to awesome at the moment.