Taste the Rainbow

This summer I'm living in a vibrant rainbow, where I'm meeting the most fascinating people of my life, exploring a brand new city, and flirting with smart strangers in various hipster-wallpapered rooms that shuffle through my mind like a Wes Anderson film.

I never know who I'll meet or what I'll learn each time I step outside. The sun is shining, and everywhere I look, everything is impossibly bright and beautiful.

This is one of the happiest periods I've known!

But when I think about my career, the summer rainbow melts away into this stark winter white room. Where the rest of my life is flexible, easy, and fluid, my personal projects are rigid, hard, and delicate, shattering as soon as I reach out to touch them. It's frigid in here, and I'm still in my wet swimsuit and cut-off shorts.

Every time I step in the room, I fight it. I try to paint the walls red, or dance color into the floors, or chop off some of my bright pink hair and tape it to the windows, hoping the light will filter through and color the whole room. Instead, everything I do fades to white.

I wonder what's wrong with me, why I can't play in the snow, why I can't skate on the ice, when I watch others doing it all around me in the room.

So I stand in the center of the white nothingness, razor to my skin, thinking that if I spill enough blood, the room will have to take on some color.

But I stop. The people who are succeeding here aren't bleeding themselves dry. They're dressed in fun furry coats, they're building igloos, they're naming their snowmen 'Igor the Muffinface' and laughing as they twirl and catch snowflakes on their tongues!

So I put down the blade. I stop cutting off my hair. I cease rage-dancing. I wave the room goodbye and shut the door.

Winter will be there when I'm ready, and I'll ski through the sky when the time comes! But for now, I'm going to lean into the rainbow, and enjoy this beautiful moment in life, and stop trying to force a season that I'm not in.