I’m coming off a fun-filled, birthday-oriented weekend: candy and a DVD brought home by The Husband; champagne and fried chicken at Parish; dinner cooked by The Sis and Bro-in-Law (TH cleaned his plate then finished off mine–per usual); new weekday uniform gifted by The Sis that, sans job, renders me wrapped in super-soft cotton for the majority of the day–plus I get to call it my Writing Outfit which endows it with official importance. All in all, good times indeed.

So why did I wake up this morning with a case of the Mondays?

I have plenty of days when I don’t crack a smile or a conversation before the morning coffee is consumed–ask any of my former roommates. Then there are the mornings like this one, when losing a contact leaves me feeling like our house was targeted for nuclear attack; when the failure of my iPhone to charge is clearly a government conspiracy to drive me insane; when my former employer’s email reveals a depth of pathology that should be accompanied by The Twilight Zone theme music; when I see the obviously anorexic girl in my spin class and am more motivated to yell at than pray for her.

All this, and the toughest thing on my To-Do List for today is to pick up TH’s glasses at LensCrafters. What gives?

I’m beginning to understand that for all my pre-unemployment longing for days off the clock, I have a problem with not pulling in an income; with not having something taxable to do with my hands. I struggle with feeling useless, with coming up with accomplishments to prove my worth, with looking at this as a transition time rather than immersing myself in the opportunity I’ve been provided. And so, waking up this morning and being faced with a week of such thoughts, I copped an attitude.

Then I went downstairs and saw the freshly-painted room that TH labored over for two weekends: the luxurious red that surpasses my expectations and makes the walls look new and shifts the light in ways I never noticed before. I see the utensil left out for me, a small act of consideration that encourages me away from measuring out my life with coffee spoons. I climb onto my bike at said spin class and give in to the recognition that the instructor’s voice makes him sound just like Zach Galifianakis–which means that if I close my eyes, I can be transported to a Vegas elevator next to a bearded man with a baby strapped to his chest.

I walk outside and feel the hint of fall in the air, see the bus carrying kids to school, and hear the voice telling me to choose thankfulness–an admonition conceived not in some hippie self-help manual alongside other vague tips like “be light” and “spread love,” but a design on my life that has a Source and a purpose and a better reason than any I could dream up. And I know, despite moodiness and selfishness and all the other worst versions of myself I can be, that the specific nature of what I believe leaves me with this truth: there is Someone making all things new, no matter how they look right now. And that believing this is an act of courage that involves vision beyond what’s in front of me or how I feel. So I wrap myself in cotton, drink my coffee, and watch the light.