It’s been a while. I wish I had a good explanation for my lack of writing lately. Something really cool like, “I HAVE JUST BEEN SO BUSY DOING SO MANY COOL THINGS THAT THERE IS TOO MUCH TO WRITE ABOUT!!!” but honestly, I stepped back because I wanted to find my voice again. Somewhere in these posts about living authentically, I lost my own sense of authenticity. I lost what makes me me and I started writing to please others. And I’m done with that. So I took some time off. 

For about two months, I have tried to write. I opened up my laptop, and I started to write a post. I would look at it, cringe, and delete it. Then I repeated this process about five more times. If you open up the “blog” folder on my laptop, 99 percent of it are posts that are about 3 sentences. Ideas and thoughts that are partially finished and will stay that way forever.

People are always telling me, “Inspiration will strike when you least expect it!” Yeah, likely story, I always thought. Because sometimes, admittedly, I would do things so I could write about them. I would curate it so that inspiration would strike exactly when I wanted it to. But yesterday, I think I realized what people are talking about. For those of you who don’t know, I work in a dining hall at Ohio University. It’s one of those things I fully expected to hate, but instead grew to have a strange appreciation, love and passion (?) for.

 A new semester means new shifts. On Thursdays from 9-12, I work Dining Hall Cleanup. The job is simple. I clean the tables after my peers leave. I fill up salt and pepper shakers. I fill the napkins. And that’s about it. When I finished my first round of cleaning tables during the drowsy, slow breakfast time, there was nothing else for me to do but

clean. more. tables.

There wasn’t anyone else to do it with me but, well, me.

I think there, in Shively dining hall, while scraping bits of dried egg and sprinkles of cereal off the large, wood tables was the first time I had really been alone with myself in a while. There wasn’t any music playing in the background. There was no T.V. to watch. There were few people who recognized me. I was just there, in the background of it all. 

I’ve always been used to working fast paced jobs. I am a total weirdo who loves dishroom just because it keeps me occupied and it keeps my eyes off the clock. Besides that, in life, I am just someone who likes to be occupied. In fact, if I were to take you through a day in the life of Grace Arnold, from the moment I wake up, to the moment I sleep, I am on a schedule. It’s not necessarily that I am busy all the time, or I have a physical schedule. But I always have a mental schedule somewhere in the forefront of my mind. It’s just that I enjoy structure, and so I create that for myself by scheduling everything-even my downtime. Boredom and I have a complicated relationship. I hate it with every fiber of my being sometimes. Sometimes I would rather do anything else in the world than be left alone with my thoughts-to the point where I say things like, “YEAH I just LOVE working in the dishroom!” Because sometimes it’s easier to do anything else than to look at yourself, to see yourself. 

And besides that, if you know me at all, you know I’m not much of a background person. I like to be upfront, in the action, and most times, I like to be the cause of the action. I like to make an impression somehow, which can be a good or a bad thing. So just being someone who sprays tables in a plain, gray shirt made me feel a little out of place.

I wasn’t Grace Arnold. I didn’t really have to be. I didn’t have to be lively, or joke-y, or friendly. I could just be. Free to be no one. Free to be me, free to be with my own thoughts, even if it was only for three hours.

And yeah, my friends heard me complain for about twenty minutes that evening about how BORED I was. But honestly, the more I thought about it, the more I realized a lot came from that three hours. I realized that when there’s nothing else for us to do, when we aren’t occupied, when we aren’t busy, that’s truly when we think. That’s when we are our most authentic selves

I don’t care how boring my shift was, because in those three hours, I thought, and I thought clearly. I found my voice again, I found my authenticity that I had lost somewhere in the posts of this very blog.

I thought about the universe, and my place in it.

I thought about the world, and my place in it.

I thought about my community, and my place in it.

I thought about my family, and my place in it.

I thought about my friend group, and my place in it.

Heck, I thought about Shively Dining Hall, and my place in it.

But most importantly, I thought about Me, and the place I have in Myself.

I hope you can find your place in yourselves, too.

Maybe you’ll be on your own version of dining hall cleanup, too. 

Do it, be bored. See what happens.

Inspiration strikes when you least expect it.

So does authenticity.