Break From Yourself

How do you break from yourself? How do you change life long habits? These are the things I ask myself. Ryan planned a really fun activity for us tonight, painting a collage, and because of me the night ended up being not so fun.

First, I'm totally intimated by paints and brushes. It's something I've never been good at, I've never been able to make anything look as good on paper with paints and brushes as it looks in my mind's eye. So I gave up trying to paint a long time ago. Give me a stack of magazines and glue and I'll make a dynamite collage, but I can't paint it.

Second, I've never been a messy person. I'm not even sure I played with finger paints as a child. It's been a joke now with my family for a while, especially when I told them I wanted to go into archeology. My mother's first reaction was "you want to dig in the dirt? You couldn't stand being dirty as a child." It even became a joke to all the people I've ever been on digs with because I was hardly ever really dirty. They all agree that I work just as hard and dig just as much as they did, I just somehow never really got dirty.

So how do I stop being a type A personality? I know in my heart Ryan just wanted us to cut loose and have some fun. He thought we would paint some cute little thing and then get in a cute fingerpaint to the face type war. I knew that's what he wanted to do and I wanted to have fun with him, but I just couldn't have fun that way. I just sat at the table most of the night staring at the brushes and paints trying to figure out what I could do, what I should do, and my mind was a blank. He was painting all kinds of cute little things like our dog and Mardi Gras beads and other things that have meaning in our relationship and I couldn't think of anything.

There are times in my life that I just look around at my friends cutting loose and doing crazy, bizarre things and I wish soooo bad to join in with them and be crazy, but I can't. I've never been able to just let go. How do you break from yourself? How do you change life long habits? How do you learn to let go?