GFMorris.com

I’m aware that I’m censoring myself for so many reasons. Like most anyone who writes about their life and publishes that online with very little, if any, barriers to reading it, I struggle with where to draw the line. Lately, I’ve drawn that line farther and farther from myself, for reasons I both do and don’t understand. [Did I freak out a bit when I heard out-of-context discussion of things that I'd written about on another Weblog? Yes, yes I did. Nothing ever came of it, though.]

Also, let’s just put it this way: November starts my fourth month of working proposals at the office. Solid. My output of non-work things was great early in that run—for example, I was driving to Nashville every Tuesday, bootlegging concerts, and getting them up in under a week—but that’s radically curtailed now. It probably hasn’t helped that church responsibilities have ramped up, as chancel choir has been doing a lot of things—fundraisers, extra practices, etc.—that have just left me with not a lot of “me” time if I don’t cut out activities. Two examples: at the beginning of October, I started a “When’s your birthday?” topic on the mailing list of our local friends, and here it’s November and I haven’t compiled anything. Sad. Sadder still, I have a concert bootleg from mid-September that I’ve done nothing with [to say nothing of two more shows since then, and ... I can only remember what the latter show was. Really. I can't remember the show before that clearly].

I want to say that things are bad, but they’re really pretty good. All the work stuff has been hard but very rewarding. As my boss noted yesterday, I could print out the corporate annual report when it comes out and point to items that I actually had a hand in bringing about. Ummm … awesome! I’ve been very blessed to have had all the opportunities that I’ve had lately, even when they’ve left me very, very beaten down.

But I think what’s messing with my head this week is that one of my mentors recently had a health scare, one the doctors are still working to figure out but one which would be easily expected to be stress-related. My mentor is fine and back at the office now, but … I won’t lie, it’s freaked me out. I’m far more concerned about them than myself, but I will admit to concern on my end. I know myself and my family enough to know that, while we’re darn talkative, we still tend to bottle up all the truly stressful things and hold them fast to us as if they’re comforting.

So if you run into me and get the thousand-yard stare, grab me by the shoulder and shake me back, would you? I find myself going into that state a lot.

The end of all this is coming by the end of the year, and the responsibilities will just shift around in different ways, for sure. I’m telling myself that it’s growth, and that growth is hard. It’s worth it, though.

[I started this with the hopes that it would help, but I've intentionally put up so many fences of vagueness that I'm not sure if it has.]