Lately, I wish I had a safe place to stash my soul when I leave the house. Because in this economy, it’s tough out there for a soul. How do I keep myself from becoming hardened or hopeless when people I know are laid off and laid low? What happens when my creativity gets a dry mouth and a bad case of the Dreads in the middle of a project?  And how do I plunge wholeheartedly into a brainstorming session when I feel brain dead from so much uncertainty and flux? I’ve learned that I can’t wait for the Muse to pay me a visit on her temperamental schedule, but I also can’t force ideas to bloom before their time. Just as it takes patience to wait for paperwhites to unfurl, so it often requires sleeping on a piece of writing to allow it to grow in darkness. On the other hand, I know from experience that practice is everything—to keep writing, to keep working, to keep hoping, over and over and over, even when you don’t want to. It’s a delicate balance and one that I’m constantly negotiating.  I want my soul to survive hard times without going into hiding or disguising its true voice, but I’m always questioning how to do that. And sometimes, the only answer I come up with is “ice cream.”  And sometimes, that’s just right.

In every yoga class I take, I know I’m coming into the home stretch when the standing poses are done. Once I’ve wobbled in Tree or flapped around like a wounded bird during Eagle, I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I’ve survived the hardest part of the hour and can spend the rest of it on my belly or back or even upside down in a Shoulder Stand. But no matter how many yoga classes I take, I can’t seem to lose my fear of the balancing poses and spend the first half of the class anticipating them, dreading them, convincing myself I’ll fail in front of everyone. I’m so obsessed with the challenge to come that I can’t stay in the moment. This is an unfortunate trait that afflicts any difficult endeavor I undertake. It applies equally to sprints in spinning class and the long middle slog of writing a piece when it all sounds like gibberish. My mind anticipates obstacles ahead instead of concentrating on what I’m doing right now in order to build up for the steep hills to come—whether they’re jumps in spinning or transition paragraphs in an essay. I want the byline and the shower after the workout, not the sweat it takes to get there.

Every month, I read and evaluate between 100 and 200 essay submissions in order to choose six to eight for the upcoming issue. For our F-Word issue this month, I noticed that some of the essays focused on why the writers were no longer feminists, or that they redefined feminism as caring for their husbands, or how they suddenly realized that being too outspoken made them unattractive to men, or how they didn’t have time for feminism after they had children. At times, I felt like I was reading the script for an old Tracy/Hepburn movie, in which the feisty, independent Hepburn is tamed and taught her true nature by Tracy’s character before they can have a happily-ever-after ending. As if feminists can’t have happy marriages and motherhood isn’t affected by the outside world. As if not being equally represented in our own government doesn’t effectively silence our voice. As if a wedding dress means we no longer have time to redress some of our community’s injustices. As if having men open car doors for us is more important than all the doors of opportunity that continue to get slammed in our faces. As if being a mother means feminism is irrelevant even though all mothers surely hope their daughters will grow up to have the same rights and protection under the law as their sons.

Recently, I spent a weekend cruising design blogs and staggered off to bed on Sunday night satiated with Cute, Adorable and Fabulous. Is this what my life has come to?, I wondered, as I fell asleep with visions of dreamy paint colors, amazing headboards and stenciled wallpaper swirling through my brain. I used to get in dramatic arguments with lovers outside bars that involved smashing Irish Coffee cups and then falling into each other’s arms under noir-ish street lights. I stayed up late talking about T.S. Eliot and sex. I have been known to jump in fountains!

I confess...

I loved The Real Housewives of Atlanta—and not in an ironic way. NeNe, come back!

I hate Twitter. I don’t want to know what half of America is thinking or doing every minute. It’s like everyone you meet having a CNN news crawl across their foreheads.

I don’t get nitrous oxide at the dentist because I worry about blurting out my deepest secrets under anesthesia.

I’m irrationally jealous of friends whose husbands fill up their gas tanks every week so they don’t have to get their hands dirty. Just thinking about it makes me want to stuff potatoes up their exhaust pipes.

Being a Kentucky Colonel makes me smile, not least of all because it makes my little brother so jealous. Is it any surprise I used to lock him out of the house when I was babysitting?

Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” is at the top of my Most Played iTunes list. My ringtone is Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” My emotional age is 12.

I think one of my life tasks is to rid myself of narcissism by the time I die. I’m not making much progress.

I never get enough birthday presents. (See above.)

Sometimes in yoga, I pretend to Om along with the class, but I’m really lip-syncing.

A friend had a collage I made of myself turned into stickers. I still have a sheet of them left and when I pulled them out recently, I thought about what I would do if I had a bunch of Mini Me's running around. If I got to live more than one dream or if I were more adventurous or spontaneous, less controlled and controlling. Here are some tasks I'd assign the Mini Me's.

Dear Mini Me:

Dinner with Bill. I’m still not sure how I got included in former President Clinton’s dinner party at a local restaurant last month (maybe they confused me with someone else), but all I could think about that night was growing up and just getting by in a Kentucky town smaller than an eyelash. Back then, I dreamed about the wider world incessantly, but I couldn’t have imagined meeting a President, much less having dinner with him. It was a lucky fluke, like so much of my life. I’m grateful for having had a hard-luck life, short on money and full of wrong turns. To me, it’s the difference between doing all your driving on a straight stretch of interstate versus the back roads and blue highways. I broke down in a lot of strange places, but my scenery along the way was much more interesting. When I was a teenager, I wanted everything I didn’t have, but now I can’t imagine how hard it must be to find your passion and motivation when you don’t want for anything. A decade or so ago, I had

I’ve spent all my life trying to be braver. A couple of months ago, I was driving to a beach near my house when I spotted a Tsunami Zone warning sign. I almost ran off the road, because it was as if the highway department had zoned in on my deepest secret fear and given it credibility. See that little stick figure desperately trying to outrun the tidal wave racing toward its back? That’s the subtext of my life story. I hate being out of control, overwhelmed, under-prepared and out of my element, so of course a tsunami is going to be in the top 5 on my list of Omigod-Middle-of-the-night Worries. (I also have an irrational fear of finding a scorpion in my shoe, but that’s a getting-out-of-bed worry.)

It makes me nervous that I can’t rehearse for, have a contingency plan for, make a list for a tsunami, any more than I can for life. I told someone recently that skirt! was a bolder,  stronger version of me, and I think it’s time for me to get closer to that alter ego. To live less cautiously, more intensely, closer to my fear. We’re all here on borrowed time and I want to stop running, turn around, and face the waves head-on.