Welcome to 2011. If there had been some sort of welcome committee, I would have signed up to be on it but I heard nothing of the sort.
It’s the time of year when everyone is incredibly optimistic. It’s the first day of a new trip around the sun, and as such we have 12 months to make this be the year that counts. This is the year when everything changes, according to most people. You know, it’s when the weight will be lost, the habits either broken or adopted, the books will be read or written, the friends will be made, the fears will be conquered.
Since being home, we’ve been trying to address a problem. The problem being my glasses. Ever since my second pair of glasses I have only worn mary-kateandashley glasses, because I love them and I just think that’s awesome. The problem is that they’ve been purchased at wal-mart for an incredibly cheap price, and you know what they say about getting what you pay for… and so my glasses, over time, have become incurably crooked and stretched out. They fall down my nose frequently and never sit straight on my face, resulting in pictures like this:
delaney, me && mckenzie at the movies.
No bueno.
In the past two weeks I have tried on countless pairs of glasses, getting frustrated by how alike some are and how different some are and how none of them seemed to be just right. Finally we were at Binyon’s and I found a pair of glasses that met my small list of criteria, meaning there was pink on them. Today we picked them up.
As I walked around with my new prescription, I realized how poorly I have been seeing. My eyes have definitely gotten worse, and it’s happened so slowly and gradually that it’s become normal to not see anything. It felt like a metaphor for my life. and not just my life, but for the lives of so many people I know.
The decision to see clearly isn’t always easy. For me, it’s never been. In 2005 I got a new pair of glasses. It had only been a few years, but I went from a tortoise shell frame to my old black ones. Before I even looked in the mirror, I started crying. My head hurt and it was hard to see anything because I had been so accustomed to not seeing right. The world moved differently, I felt more fragile, and I wanted nothing more than to put my old glasses on. But there’s a little bit of a wearing in process to new vision. After walking around Wal-mart for awhile, my eyes started to get used to the crispness of my sight and the next obstacle came when I went home and looked in the mirror…
and hated how I looked. New vision made me look different. I felt like nobody would recognize me, and that I was trying to be someone I was not. It took me awhile.
But these are things I think about adopting anything new.
You know, for the first few years of high school I wore pajamas to school. I am not even kidding. I would go to Old Navy and buy pajamas and think of which hooded sweatshirt I owned would match them, and I decided to wear pajamas. I look back in shame at this time in my life, don’t worry. That all changed my senior year, when I became the class president. I decided that I should be more presentable. So I began wearing skirts. and I wore skirts from 2002 – 2007, when I decided to get a dress for Erik and Marie’s wedding. That sparked something within me, because I’ve been wearing dresses ever since and I own no less than 65 dresses.
When I first started wearing dresses, people would always ask “oh, why are you so dressed up?” or “ooh, is there a boy you’re trying to impress?” and I had to do a lot of explaining for awhile, until finally everybody got so used to me wearing dresses all the time that people get all worked up if I wear jeans. Jeans and shoes is a rarity and then jeans, shoes and socks? hardly ever.
The point of all this rambling {and there is one, I promise} is to encourage you to embrace change, to really change in the depths of your soul. Be ready for resistance, from yourself and your old comfortable ways, and also from other people who have their own ideas about what you should change or why you should change.
But what do I know. I’m just a girl who never finishes anything she starts. Here’s to 2011. Let’s live our dreams.
Also. A picture of my new glasses, so you can see how similar they are to my old glasses. But know that they have pink on the inside, and so I am in a constant state of happy. It’s only been three hours, but you know. I will be in a constant state of happy.
and also. big announcement. Seeing as how it is a new year and all… I am restarting my 365. Last year I went into it all gung-ho and felt that I did a fairly decent job at it. But I’d started it on another blog that crapped out on me and trying to incorporate it on this way a hundred days into it was frustrating. This is my… third? try. Maybe fourth. But here we go. So.
1/365 – Tiffany’s Wedding.
I played the piano for Tiffany’s wedding. Didn’t get any pictures of the ceremony, but I sat next to this precious little 5-year-old. We discovered that we both are from Washington, love pink, and like daisies. She let me wear her bracelet and we both got purple cupcakes, which is what this is a picture of.