So, I’m thinking that perhaps the next time it’s 5:00 PM and I still have a couple hours of clients to go and I’m getting sleepy, I maybe ought to try the ice water route, instead. Maybe. No reason… (Blink. Blink. Blink. Why am I not asleep yet? Hmmm….)

After an hour spent catching up with emails (after a 12 hour day of clients), an hour spent blog-surfing, and half of an hour spent playing mahjong on my two inch by three inch phone screen, my brain just won’t shut off. Or shut up. Which is leaving my husband wondering when I’m going to shut off the light and let him sleep.

It all began with an email from Anne Marie, a very cool and very sweet mom I met this year through my son’s class at school. (Interestingly enough, her name is a combination of my and my daughter’s middle names. But that’s only interesting because it’s 1:02 AM and I’m wide awake. But I digress…) After corresponding several times over a project we were working on together for our kiddos’ teacher, we’d begun corresponding about blogs and website design, because I’d spent some time poking around her very fun and creative graphic design portfolio.

The topic turned to writing, and that’s when this whole mind-spinning-not-sleeping thing began in earnest. Anne Marie told me about a friend of hers, Marla, a local woman who had “authored a few books.” My eyebrows raised. I have one of her books. My sister-in-law, who was likewise friends with Marla, had given one to me when she had finished it. Years ago. How ironic was that? I read on, and my eyebrows went up even higher, as Anne Marie recommended to me Ann Voskamp’s blog, a holy experience, based on her book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. Which, of course, was the third time this week someone had recommended her blog to me, and guess what? Yep. I already have the book. ?!?!?

What ensued from there was an hour or more of reading and exploring these women’s blogs, and the blogs they were linked to, and the blogs those were linked to, and… you get the idea. 1:25 AM, and still not sleeping.

Here’s the thing. Normally, that would have frightened me. Discouraged me. Disenheartened me, if that’s a word. (At 1:28 AM, it’s a word if I say it’s a word.) Normally. But things are not normal around here, anymore. Now, I’m thinking things like, Why not me? Why not now? Why not all the way? Which is really, really cool.

Unless, of course, you’re trying to go to sleep.

I’m not any different than any of these women. There is no reason I could not do this, short of just choosing not to try. Out of fear. Out of self-consciousness. Out of complacency.

The truth of the matter is that I have done hard, uncomfortable things before. Many of them were not my idea, but I did them nonetheless, and I lived to tell about them. Obviously. Not one but two master’s degrees. (Don’t ask. Long, annoying story.) Natural childbirth. (After four hours on Pitocin. Nothing natural about it.) Running a half-marathon, having never run more than a mile before in my life. (Ouch. That’s all I have to say about that.) I can do hard things. I just have to set my mind to it.

I am setting my mind. I am pulling it off of its spinning, aimless trajectory, and I am setting it on this path, and I am not letting fear “grab me by the tail and shake me,” as my friend Kim quoted to me earlier this week. There is no good reason why, in five years, another woman could not be sitting up at 1:37 AM writing about having been on my blog, not able to sleep because of what it stirred up in her. No good reason.

I’m still not ready to turn out the light, but I’m ready to power down for the night. Six hours of editing await me tomorrow, and you’d better believe the beverage of choice will be caffeinated come morning.

I’ll be sure to stop by 3:00PM. Or earlier. Or, perhaps, not…