You know that dress? The one hanging in the closet that you haven’t worn anywhere yet. Maybe because an occasion hasn’t come up or because it needs to be altered or because you’re just not ready to step past your front door and let everyone see this dress. It’s that dress you sometimes slip on and twirl around in front of the mirror. The dress that makes you look incredible. The dress you can’t wait to show people. The dress that you know will take you the places you want to go.
Dreams are like that dress. We hold our dreams close. We take them out and think about them. We work on them, tweak them, shine them up. And when we think we’re ready, we start sharing those dreams. With the people around us, our co-workers, our friends, the man on the street corner, the busboy at the restaurant. Sometimes we let our dreams fly a little too soon. Sometimes they needed a little more work, and our excitement got our left foot in front of our right foot and we tripped ourselves up. Sometimes, some dreams are better left unsaid, better left in the hands of those who made them come into being in the first place.
Some dreams can be let out of the cage to fly without being ridiculed and stomped down into the ground. Other dreams need to be protected, held close, worked over and tweaked in the silent chambers of our souls. I’m still working on the wisdom to know the difference between those two.
The older I get, the more I realize that nearly everything in life is a choice. I am fond of verbally backing myself into a corner, lamenting about how I don’t have a choice over X, Y or Z. Untrue. It may feel like I don’t have any other choices, but the truth is, I’m just not willing to entertain other options.
I’ve made choices based on finances. Choices I made because I told myself my bank account couldn’t handle a different path. The reality was most of those choices based on finances were made because I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my savings goals or my unwillingness to take out more loans.
I’ve made choices to stay in relationships long past the jump-ship point. Choices I made because I told myself it was better to be with someone than to be alone. Choices I made because I told myself they needed my help – as if I was the only person on the entire planet who had the ability to help them. Seriously, how narcissistic is that? The reality was that I chose to stay. Nobody forced me into it. The yellow-brick road didn’t stop.
I’ve made choices to live and to move. To take a job or keep on looking. To take the fork to the left or keep on going straight. To buy a microwave or do without. Choices, all of them choices, and almost none of them was my back scrunched into a corner. I felt like it – many times I have felt like a cold stone wall was digging into my shoulders as I faced down my decisions with a lone shot in my rifle. But in reality, I just wasn’t looking hard enough for extra shells, and I wasn’t looking in the right places.
Always…never…only…these are ultimatums, and ultimatums are dangerous. They’re also powerful which is why it’s easy to stumble into a choice that looks like a dead-end with nowhere to go. But nowhere to go? Come on, now, are you sure? Climb out of the box canyon. Dig a tunnel. Make a rope. How does that saying go?
“Sometimes opportunities are disguised in hard work.”
We were born into the comparison game. There was never a need to read the instructions or pick up your game piece at the door; the comparison game is just one of those things we were born knowing how to play. Why couldn’t we born knowing how to do something useful like solving complicated math equations?
I’m really good at the comparison game. Or really bad, depending on your view. I’m really good at it, because I compare a lot which is really bad. Physical attributes, cake-baking skills, house-cleaning habits, getting up from spills, hits on the funny meter, being neater, perhaps even a little sweeter. That’s just a short list – made infinitely shorter from the out-of-nowhere urge to rhyme.
I was born into the comparison game. I was not born with things like a set of bodacious ta-tas, an insatiable urge to clean my house twice a week or the gift of sitting around the campfire and telling funny stories. Which is fine, most of the time. Until I run into a situation where I find myself glancing down at my chest and wondering what it might be like to have Hells Canyon-type cleavage or wishing I could use my windows as a mirror for flossing my teeth or being able to wring laughs out of a group with no more effort than taking a breath. (Depending on who you are with that last one. If you’re a dead guy, then taking a breath is probably an almighty big effort. And with the second, if you have no teeth, then you probably don’t want a mirror-like window. And for the first, if you’re a man…I personally don’t think you should be desiring Hells Canyon cleavage.)
The comparison game is depressing for me. Rarely do I ever compare myself with someone where I might “win”. Which, if I did, I’d struggle with admitting that anyway, because who wants to be friends with someone who picks on the little guy while he’s down? You don’t step on people like that. Unless you accidentally don’t see them, because they just tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and you were too busy talking on your cell phone to notice. Hands-free is the way to be!
But also, who wants to be friends with the person who sets themselves up to lose? ALL the time. I just as well walk around with my finger and thumb in the shape of an L on my forehead (Song, anyone? Anyone??) Because you see, I never choose to compare something I’m okay with. I always pick something that I’m staggering along the cliff of insecurity with.
Comparisons are ridiculous. I always fall short, and I’m already quite short enough, thank you. I think it is human nature to compare. Our looks, our possessions, our families, our personalities – we compare, because of that whole keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ type thing.
Well. I don’t want to be like the Jones’. I want to be like me, all my imperfections and shortcomings to boot. So I’m not turning heads and I don’t have a clean house and I’m not stand-up comedian funny? Okay, that’s cool, I can deal. What I can’t deal with is feeling like I’m trying to mold myself into someone’s skin and doing things and pursuing ideals that don’t fit me simply because I came up short when I played the comparison game.
No more comparison game. I don’t like it. I’d rather think about other things. Like complicated math equations and the properties of dish soap and why the Nutcracker is so popular.
I had this whole great thing started about comparisons and ta-tas and clean houses and Hells Canyon. They go together…actually they don’t, but do check back in tomorrow so I can lead you down the intricate path of my brain as I tie those four things together in a neat little package tied with a big sloppy bow.
In the meantime, I’ve started a new thing. I know, be careful, I’m going all Superwoman on your hiney.
I started another online project. It’s a book blog. It’s cool. If you like books. If you don’t, then go sit in the corner and count to 8 hundred million thousand and then we can be friends again. I used to read. All the time. It got me into a lot of trouble when I was a kid which is totally irrelevant to your life and absolutely central to mine. But not as central as breathing, chocolate, showers and those cute fuzzy little slippers. The thing is, Adult Me doesn’t read that often. Adult Me pretends like she doesn’t have time or doesn’t want to or should be doing something more important.
So I told Adult Me to shove a sock in it and I started a book blog to write about what I read. Sometimes I have to trick myself into doing things I know I like and want to do but have given darty, shifty reasons for avoidance for years. This is Kid Me tricking Adult Me into doing something she’s forgotten how much she loves: The Readin’ Redheads.
My heart has stopped no less than four times today, and my mind is stuck on a repeat so relentless a robot would be annoyed with it. I can only assume these symptoms are a result of this weekend’s moment when I ripped my finger open on an impossibly rusty chunk of barbed wire. While my first 18 thoughts, emotions and hollerings consisted of something similar to “ow”, my 19th was a fleeting musing about when my last tetanus shot was. I’m sure there’s absolutely nothing else that could be causing these symptoms.
“Her hands lace together, index fingers pressing into her temples, propping her head up, digging into her flesh. Her eyes stare blankly through the web her hands have created, her thoughts blessedly numbed by too much…just too much.”
What is too much? How do you measure too much? I can measure too much chocolate syrup on my ice cream or too much dip for my chips – if I still have dip on my plate and the chips are gone, then there’s too much dip.
I can measure too much rain. I look in my rain gauge, and I take stock of the ground and the absorption levels and calculate the amount of rain up to this point. When it’s flooding, there’s too much rain.
I can measure too much coffee. I’ve had too much coffee before. My heart flips and twists and races far too quickly. I get jittery and restless. I pace and feel like a heart attack is coming – whatever that feels like. I’ve never had one, and I hope I never do – but I can measure too much coffee.
But how do you measure too much work? Is too much when you shove aside everything else for the sake of your work? How do you measure too much emotion? Too much money? (They say there is no such thing. I disagree.) Too much family time? Too much time spent on things with too little significance?
I have too much going on right now. It’s too much. I know that. I’m admitting that. I want to talk about all this too much-ness, but I can’t. Or I won’t. Mostly I can’t. And it doesn’t matter that I can’t. Well, it does, but it’s how the dice have been rolled, so…it doesn’t matter. Maybe just by admitting that I have too much will help. Even if it’s just a little help, that would be a good thing, I think.
“How do you know when how much is too much? Too much too soon? Too much information? Too much fun? Too much love? Too much to ask? And when is it all just too much to bear?” ~ Grey’s Anatomy
There are some things you just can’t help but notice. Yesterday, a man eased to a stop as I was walking down the road with my dastardly wonderful teenage puppy. I was standing fairly close to the vehicle as it was windy and hard to hear. Right there, smack dab, holy-wow-this-is-prominent, was a calendar that I can only describe as a member of the pin-up style of calendars. Folks, what the July model was wearing was not what I would call a bathing suit. At all. I couldn’t even begin to imagine that it might have been a bathing suit before someone got crazy with the scissors and cut 99% of it away.
Why do you need a pin-up calendar on the dash of your vehicle? Wait…I don’t want to know. I’m going to stop now, because this is teetering dangerously close to the edge of AWKWARD.
By the way, it is illegal to talk or text on cell phones and drive in the state of Washington. Which means, you know, yes…besides, he was also drinking a beer. It’s because of people like him that we can’t have nice things.
