Perspective

For the past couple of years I’ve stopped making New Year’s resolutions. By March they’re forgotten anyway and then I feel like a total failure. I also tended to be one of those people that wrote a long list of impossible things. I was setting myself up for failure. Plus, it was hard to remember. Now, instead of resolutions I choose one word to be my guide for the whole year. The word represents something I want to cultivate more of in my life, something I desperately need. For 2015 the word was JOY. For 2016, my word is PERSPECTIVE.

I settled on this word because of a horrible nightmare I had the other night. In this nightmare, I was in an African village that was being attacked by warlords. You know: the scary guys that ride around in Jeeps with child soldiers and big guns and shiny sunglasses and machetes. The coked up ones. This is probably my greatest fear. That and being captured by ISIS. Oh, and being buried alive. That thought scares the shit out of me. But back to my nightmare. It was So. Real. And it kept repeating itself. I’d start to wake up and it would loop so that once again I’m hiding under a table with this girl from my MFA program who does aid work (of course she’s there with me) and they arrive and they see us and…I wake up.

I lay in bed for a good long while in the middle of the night, heart beating fast. I was so goddamn grateful that I wasn’t…