Living the Life You Want
There is a difference between living the life you have and the life you want. How many roadblocks are between the life you have and the life you want? What would it take to get to the life you want?
I get being content with what you have, but at some point you are just accepting the status quo and not reaching toward a goal or personal growth. There is a whole population of people that I admire in their ability to be content with where they are (seemingly, because you can never actually know unless you ask and they feel like sharing). There is also a population that do the best they can with where they are, staying in the same town, or returning to that town and making their best go. And then there are those that run far from everything and strike up a whole new life away from their roots. And then there are entrepreneurs, those risk takers on a tightrope with no safety net and my mind almost explodes.
I am a person easily swayed by the opinions of others. I know, it’s horrible to admit, but it’s true. I can be come completely happy with my fantastic red lipstick until a sister makes a critical statement. Heck, I didn’t even wear makeup for years because I heard things growing up about the type of women that wear makeup, or too much makeup (honestly, the whole makeup criticism runs together and it all just became bad), and when I thought it was all bad and indicative of a type of ill trusted person, I stopped wearing it completely. And that was then considered bad too. My pale skin blended together to look like a washed out clump of clay and people would ask if I were sick. Yes, I was sick. I was sick of having to bend to opinions of others.
If shape shifting were a human skill, I was a master. I could change to make others happy, or at least negotiate my appearance and behavior to be pleasing to their desires, including boyfriends. It might just be here at 40 (41 if we are counting), that I am starting to fall in love with myself and realize my wants and life desires. I looked for happiness in love, instead of being happy right where I was. But I could not be happy where I was because I didn’t have a plan or a goal, I just kind of let life happen and then I reacted.
I read the books. And some of them were really good. Things could change for a while, but mostly there was never a time that I thought I had a value beyond the one assigned to me by others. I was uncomfortable with me. No lipstick or new sweater could settle that uncomfortable feeling of being out of place.
I’ve spent the last 10 years calling myself a stay-at-home mom, a phrase that makes my skin crawl because of the cultural association of what this entails but mostly because it means trading in your personal productivity to parent. No one thinks about how returning to work will look after they take a leave. I certainly didn’t and now it has been years longer than I thought it would be and employment comes in a couple of hour blocks at best. Some remote work, some other work, some substitute teaching work…a patch work of deposits that your bank doesn’t acknowledge as a real income so they debit your account $12 a month for maintenance.
How did you find the life you wanted to live?
What type of person are you?
I am the person that is currently digging deep to find that life.
We live in a beautiful, and very fast growing town, but it’s the place we call home. I think my children find it a joyful place to live. I have a few million cells in my body urging me to pick and find another place, some place warm, some place far away, some place where I can challenge myself and grow because you know, I am still trying to find that life that makes sense.
