I have always been a very serious person. My mom says that when I was a young child, I played with my dolls with such stoic intensity that she was tempted to try shake me out of it: Lighten up, you're only five years old! Playing house, reading story books, coloring pictures...it was all serious business to me. I probably came out of the womb with a furrowed brow. People told my parents I was an "old soul." I guess that's one term for children who have a suspicion that childhood isn't going to last forever; it's hard to retain innocent childish glee if you're wise enough to look down the road ahead.
Freshman year of high school, my choir director told me to try to look less pensive all the time. Apparently my brooding expression was distracting from the joyful mood of certain songs. I was not aware that I looked pensive. I even had to look up the word "pensive" in the dictionary. I then wondered if I did, in fact, always look like I was in my own little world and that this little world was a very serious place indeed.
The Russian lover keeps things simple: "Snap out of it," he says. Or, "Lighten up." And sometimes, if I'm anxiously pensive, "Would you just fucking relax?" Easier said than done for someone who has never tread lightly on this earth. Everything is a mystery to contemplate, a problem to overthink, or a disaster waiting to happen. It's hard to get out of my mind and into the world around me; introverted doesn't begin to describe it.
Slowly, I'm learning to come out of myself. I'm learning to take things as they come and not stew on them impotently. Life with the Russian lover can be a roller coaster at times; he's made a career out of "crisis management" and runs headlong into dealing with problems and emergencies. I've spent a lifetime alternately contemplating and panicking, but rarely confronting and acting. If I'm to avoid giving one of us a heart attack with my approach to life, then I've got to change my approach. The Russian lover has been patiently trying to push me out of the nest, so to speak. But it will be up to me whether I take flight or hit the ground.
See? I am even serious about my seriousness. The Russian lover thinks that my blog gets too...pensive, at times. Or as he put it, "Your writing needs more boobs." He's probably right. Life is short and difficult but there is no use dwelling too morosely on any of it.
There are boobs to be talked about.