What Else Can I Do?

What could I do if I just did what I was feeling in the moment; what could I do if I just knew it didn't need to be perfect... Oh how glad I am that I have song lyrics to do my thinking for me... Actually, I've never felt the need to be perfect (this should be obvious to anyone whose known me for more than 2.5 seconds) but that doesn't mean I've been content either (this shouldn't be breaking news either). Until recently. (Okay, content is a stretch). While I've never felt the need to be perfect I have felt the need to...abide by a certain standard; My familys' (sometimes real, sometimes imagined), the standard implied by arbitrary numbers (what does the number of candles on my birthday cake have to do with my style choices??), and a whole host of other random "rules" imposed by...whomever. This line of thinking led to a lot of things, none of them good, until something compltetly unexpected happened; I stopped thinking and stared doing. Or, more to the point, I stopped thinking about things from "everybody else's" perspective (more or less) and started thinking about them from my own. I'm six years into Writing Rainbow, a feat that has required a good amount of ingenuity and sacrifice, one of which was waiting a year for full time status at my job when it was offered to me immediately. Why, you ask, would someone who, by her own admission, has been desperate for a stable work situation not jump at the chance for full time employment when offered? Well I asked myself the same question but I knew the answer before I did so. Full time would't allow me the flexibility to run Writing Rainbow the way I wanted. Still did it make sense to forgo a steady, full time position for something that lives yet to become a full fledged business? It did to me. It turned out to be the right move and, a year later (actually 11 months for anyone keeping score) when I was again offered full time it felt right to take it. Now, most of this probably seems unremarkable, as it should; there is absolutely nothing noteworthy about a middle-aged woman making basic decisions about her own life. It's like saying you went for a walk in the forest and came home with a mosquito bite; duh. But when you're stumbling through the woods and the shadowy figure you just ran from turns out to be a tree, it's still a relief. And that is exactly what I feel like I've been doing until recently, stumbling though an unusually thick forest, tripping over branches. Which isn't to say I'm not now, it't just that nowadays I tend to catch myself more often. In the last year + I've turned my part time teaching position into a full time, guided my writing program towards its next phase (including my first press coverage), and started to feel in sync with certain aspects of my family; all because somewhere along the line I decided that (not even sure I did it consciously) I didn't need to be acceptable (this is still a work in progress), I just needed to be. It makes me wonder, what else can I do?