Tears for Fears: How To Be Your Best When Your Shit's A Mess
It is as if your apartment is a snow globe, and the hand of the Divine picked, shook, and turned upside down. There is a crack, and you came tumbling out. Hitting the sidewalk in a belly flop. You fix your hair, or try, and off you go. Good FUCKING morning.
Is that my mascara or did my contact fall out? Shit! Is that the bus? HOLD ON, DAMMIT!
Add to that it is not even the first time this week your day has started this way. If it is recommended to hit the gym at least three times a week, is there a safe number of days a body can start off all wrong and still claim some measure of adult respectability? (Dear God, do tell me there is? A number somewhere near … 100 maybe!?)
None. Yup, It ain’t just you. We, pushing through the salad bar at Whole Foods and seeming to not sweat at Spin, are also deep in one of two internal conversations:
I am falling apart!
When will I ever get it together?
You aren’t and never. There is no “together”. All of life is falling - just think about birth?!
Now, this is NOT to say don’t brush your teeth or pay your bills promptly (doing so - the bill paying part - is essential to building a culture of fiscal abundance and respect that welcomes and includes all of us). Rather, there is much more wisdom in the fray than we often care to notice.
When we are stuck in a run around for some phantom plateau of acceptable adult aptitude, we are dumb to what successes come from the rouge creativity stolen within in the manic managing.
OK….what?
Think about cooking or theatrical production - the substitutes, the understudy choices, the “curtains up in 5” pressure bequests us unexpected clarity. I ask you to only think of what brilliant answers you come up with to the unrehearsed interview questions, what you say that blows away your manager at the presentation that you had to cover last week, or the way you respond to forgetting the “thing”, tossed the project, asked to perform centerstage - with your pants off?
Not only is your surviving worth a hearty self congratulations, but, with a bit of study, those successful passes can be made repeatable wins. Tools. When you are just trying to survive there is little time for existential doubt. And that is a fucking gift and relief!t
What about thinking the beauty about:
First kisses - the ones planted before you could finish that sentence/
The time you found an opened pack of cigarettes under your bed when you were moving out
A pet you never intended on adopting that changed your whole trajectory - for the better as good beasts always do.
The interview you bombed, and still got hired.
An email you never returned that was super important and never ended up mattering.
The SATs. Talk about stress over a massive “who cares”
All the above and so, so much more.
Hey, did I mention: your hair looks great windblown and I woke up crying today - like for the second time this week?I am avoiding mirrors and checking and rechecking my bank balance in hopes I am misremembering the figures from the last time. I have been here before. Welcome to Panic Town - be prepared to visit frequently, but permanent residency is near impossible. Immigration difficult. Wisdom, eternal.
