We’ll come back to that.

My boyfriend and I took an outing to the Kansas City Zoo last weekend (when that sun thing was out – imagine!). The BF loves zoos, but he’s especially obsessed with the St. Louis Zoo. I can’t blame him, it’s free and well maintained and the penguin exhibit is great. Still, the KC Zoo is nothing to sniff at. It’s sprawling, with all the usual animals and some stand-outs, including a back-flipping (in the water) polar bear and lots of elephants (my personal favorite). And yes, chimpanzees.

The thing is, I have a particularly emotional relationship with chimps. No, I’ve never had one as a pet. No, I’ve never been maimed by one (too soon?). But the last time I visited the chimp exhibit in St. Louis, I started sobbing in front of the glass. I was wearing sunglasses, so you couldn’t see my eyes, just gobs of tears rolling down my cheeks and onto my neck. When my boyfriend (who, after almost 7 years of knowing me, is used to my random, tearful outbursts) stopped chuckling at me long enough to pull me aside and ask what was wrong, all I could sputter out was: “They look so human.” I couldn’t stand them sitting in there, listless, looking at me as if to say, “I give up.”

While I realize I was probably projecting my own emotions onto these animals, to this day I still have trouble watching chimps in zoos. So thank God for Kansas City’s giant, wonderful chimp enclosure. Last weekend, I could barely make out the chimpanzees, as they had climbed to the tops of several towering trees. I have never been happier to not be able to properly see an animal at a zoo.

That said, monkeys don’t bother me. Not a bit. If my BF had a daemon (His Dark Materials, people), it would be some species of little golden monkey. Which is exactly what greeted us inside the Tropics house — golden lion tamarins.

To connect back to the definition up top (told you I would get there), we just bought a new DSLR. Fancy stuff. And I decided to try it out on the tamarins. Thing is, my BF had set the camera not to show photos on the screen after they’d been captured. Doods, I am a chimper. I need to immediately evaluate my work. So I changed the setting and continued snapping shots. No harm done.

But today I started considering my chimping problem. And this is an issue that goes way beyond photography.

I’m realizing how many times have I saved and re-saved this draft, even after the most minute of adjustments, how often I’ve worried about what impression this post will elicit, and, outside this blog, how many times I’ve stopped myself from saying or doing things because they weren’t perfect or fact-checked or valid enough… By checking myself — chimping myself (ha, that sounds dirty) — I have been dampening myself.

I’m not saying that I’m suddenly going to out and do something risky and ridiculous. That’s not me. And that’s not what I meant to convey by writing this post. But I need to live — and let live — a little more. Worry less. Obsess less. And hey, putting myself out there will give me more to write about.