Skipping Stones

Life is about routine. We get up, we get, dressed, we go to work or walk our dog or pluck our eyebrows, and blah, blah, blah. Like life, relationships are about routine. It might sound boring, but we like to know what to expect. You call Sally when you are having guy problems and June for medical advice. Wednesdays are girls’ nights. Saturday mornings we take our children to the park. Until one day we wake up and the past few weeks have been almost the same. Your friends ask you “What’s up?” and you instantly say “Nothing.” because like last week, nothing is really up. Sure you take family vacations and routinely have Thursday date night, but as for something new, something different, you can’t think of anything.

I’ve written this column on life, love and relationship (let’s be honest, mainly dating) for a while now, and as many people know, I’m writing a book about dating. Between the book, Daily Vogue and my various other projects, my life has become a routine of write, yoga, work, write, run, work. Sometimes I go to spinning class. I’m so wild. Then last week we decided my efforts would be better spent interviewing designers than writing a relationship column. My heart sunk. But I am the relationship column writer! I silently protested. I have master’s degree in psychology. If I don’t write this column, that’s $100,000 down the drain. I need this column. I am this column. 

But I’m not. When we lay out the path towards our goals, we get attached to some stepping stones. We heart these stones so much that sometimes we loiter watching the way they sparkle in the sun, loving the view from that stone. I was stuck on the stone of this column, and so stuck on it that I didn’t realize I was turning it into a version of my book. The column became repititive, didn’t fit the intention of the site, and because it is my favorite subject each week, it kept me from digging deep inside myself for my other writing projects.

In short, you have to change it up. Sometimes you have to abandon your set of stones all together and choose a different path towards a different goal. (You have more than one goal, right?) Or hop back a few or skip over the next step. After I learned that this week will indeed be my last Love & Life column, I went back to the health, career and personal goals that I wrote down several months ago. In the personal column it read “Compiling stories for my dream book.” Without unveiling too much, the new importance on interviewing designers compliments the preparation I need to compile stories for my dream book. So no, I’m abandoning part of the platform that might have helped secure my book deal, but I’m working towards something more exotic…something deeper.

If we don’t change, we stay the same.

Emma Dinzebach

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Posted by Emma Dinzebach at 09:15 AM
Bargain Hunting , bargain news , Points of View , Relationships , STYLE/BEAUTY , TRENDS |