I knew it wasn’t my scene as soon as I drew back the tent flap and saw a dozen spandex-clad people jogging through a circuit that involved turning two somersaults in the middle and then bounding to your feet to skip three turns of double-dutch.  That’s what I get for being five minutes late, I suppose. I joined the single file circuit and gamely attempted my first forward roll since second grade gym class.  Much more successful than skipping, where the rope whacked me in the head repeatedly before I managed to clear the requisite number of jumps.

Photo by OneFlameintheFire

The rest of circus camp didn’t go much more smoothly. I hit myself in the face with a juggling ball and felt my blood pressure skyrocket when I couldn’t even manage to consecutively catch two #$%^@ little bean bag things with any regularity.  And then there were the silks, which involve climbing and hanging off a giant scarf suspended from the ceiling. I made it three feet off the ground and hung there limply while the instructor quizzed me on how I manage to get my bangs so smooth and straight in this humidity (I refrained from telling her that they’re real and spectacular – no straightening iron here). All frustration and no fun. There are more palatable ways to spend those scarce summer nights (in theory only, people).

When I got home, I emailed the registrar and politely requested a refund. Yeah, I quit. Ya wanna make something of it? I said recently that most of our lives are devoted to trying to figure out how to be in the world and negotiating fine lines is a significant part of that. The line between giving it your all and rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, between aborting an unsuccessful mission and taking your ball and going home as soon as things momentarily stop going your way, between being generous with the benefit of the doubt and being a grade A sucker. You get the drift. Figuring out when to throw in the towel on a relationship/activity/behavior/belief that fails to meet your needs falls into this category. While only you can decide this for yourself (and making that judgment call gets easier with practice), here are a few handy dandy questions that I ask myself when deciding whether to tough something out or cut my losses:

What would happen if I quit?

Widespread shunning, being pelted with tomatoes in the town square or having to relocate your primary residence to a van down by the river are unlikely prospects, but what about feeling like a failure? Having more free time? Reducing stress? Having to engage in confrontation? Be honest and exhaustive and look at both the positive and negative consequences of walking away, with an eye to evaluating just how likely they are to happen, how significant they could be and, in the case of downsides, what, if anything, you could do to mitigate their effects.

Is this activity/relationship/behavior helping me to be who I want to be or to get where I want to go?

This is the big one and it has nothing to do with building your personal brand. It’s about asking yourself what you want your life to look and feel like and evaluating whether the activities and relationships in question support these values or work against them. For example, writing/pontificating/boring the internet with my minutiae makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and important. This blog helps me to do that. Sometimes, I have nothing to say or I would rather be doing 106 other things (frolicking through the park in a frilly dress with a dachshund by my side comes to mind) than sitting in front of my laptop, but because I have a very clear understanding of where this activity fits into my life and my world domination plans, I suck it up and power through the dry spells.

It’s also important not to get caught in the trap of evaluating an activity based on whether or not you excel at it. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it if you loathe the prospect and just because you’re at the bottom of the class in another area, it doesn’t mean it should be scrapped if you’re having a blast. You can be an absolutely abysmal basketball player and still live for Thursday night pick-up games or you can be Midwestern Pharmaceutical Sales Rep of the Year for four years running and still dread the thought of getting up for work every morning. Take proficiency out of the equation and focus on how you feel when participating.

If you ask yourself this question and the answer is no (This friendship makes me feel like an unpaid shrink. Running is giving me shin splints and making me hate exercise and I’m more interested in capoeira anyway, etc.), letting go doesn’t make you a quitter. Nope,  it makes you savvy enough to understand that our time and energy resources are limited and should be spent on those activities and individuals that are in line with our values and make us feel good about ourselves in the long-term, with the understanding that there will always be short-term bumps in the road.

What could I be doing instead?

If you quit doing or being X, what  would you then have resources to tackle in its place? Is the potential alternative more attractive than what you’d be giving up? The alternative doesn’t even have to be bigger and better (Well, if I quit the genealogical society, I could devote my Monday nights to reading to blind orphans), it just has to be more valuable to you (see Q2). And yes, free time and unearmarked space to simply breathe and/or sit on your porch sipping sweet tea totally counts.

A few weeks ago, I put out the call on Twitter for folks interested in career/life coaching and/or personal development who’d be willing to participate in digital kaffeeklatsches here on GenMeh*. Steph Auteri was one of the first to raise her hand to volunteer. Brave woman. Recently, she and I had a little chat about her coaching services for writers, her freelance exploits and the fact that a one-size-fits-all approach to digital privacy doesn’t cut it. Also, we mention the S word (oh my!) and a few of the jargon-y terms that set my blood boiling. The resulting confab** is below.

Steph Auteri talks career coaching and sex blogging from Generation Meh on Vimeo.

*If that’s you, or you just want me to ask you obnoxious or awkward questions on camera (I have an inexhaustible supply!), you should let me know.

** My video editing skills will get better as the series goes along. Maybe.

Today’s American Dream guest essay (submissions always welcome)  is courtesy of Jessica Balmer. And guess what? JESSICA ISN’T EVEN AMERICAN! Is your mind blown by the universality of this concept yet?

Get ready. Get set…

Often I feel that this point in my life is equivalent to standing at the edge of a precipice waiting to jump (in a good way, not an imminent death way), or milling about at the starting line, before getting into the blocks, or standing and stretching outside of the car before getting in and settling down for a long drive; the jump or race or drive representing my real life.

Photo by h.koppdelaney

Everything I’ve done so far seems preparatory for the real life that I will start living any day now. I did high school, undergrad, interning, working a bit, grad school, working a little more. In other words I’ve done a fair share of stuff a.k.a. living, but I think of said stuff as laying the ground work for the life that will start once I get a real career and a real home and start growing my family for real and traveling (more) and so on. The expression life is not a dress rehearsal comes to mind. Yes, life is not a dress rehearsal, but this part of my life is…or at least that’s what it feels like.

I’ve read accounts of people claiming that at age 60, 70, 90, they feel the same as they did at 15, 20, 25. They are acting at grown-up life, their skin forming a shell of maturity around the brain and heart and general being of the person they were in their youth. Perhaps this is what I’m tapping into.

I keep expecting a switch to flip and rocket me into feeling like a bona fide adult, where I’ll look around and meet the eyes of other adults and nod, knowingly. Yes, I’m an adult too, yes. Dinner parties, bills and work, you know. Yes. White wine and real estate, of course. I assume that that’s just how it happens.* My parents were kids. Then they were adults. I feel young, directionless, and semi-capable, but one day I will feel mature, on-course and fully capable, responsible in fact for the lives and/or careers of others. One day.

In the meantime, I feel like my life and the lives of my friends occupy this weird state of limbo, of not-real-life-ness. We’re getting ready, all of us, to start. The real stuff (kids, homes, etc.) is on the horizon, maybe a few years away. But I also think, and maybe know but deny, that that’s definitely not true and that this is life and it is real and we have more than started. That this is how adults/grown-ups/grandparents think and feel about their own lives and selves. Maybe there’s more of a sense of accomplishment, an acknowledgment of time passed and  life lived and maturity/experience achieved for older folks, but it too is coupled with a feeling of youth and pretending and uncertainty.

We, my friends and I, have careers and bills and plans, and accomplishments; some have homes and others, on the periphery of my friendships, even have kids. But when I turn my gaze navel-wards, I don’t see my specific circumstance as being comparable—even though for all intents and purposes, and measured by all standards, it is.

Maybe it’s because I have no mapped plan for the future. I hear that people make five and ten year plans. That is something people do, right? Maybe if I envisioned my life at 30 and 35 I would have a blueprint that would make my life-measurement more tangible. Maybe with those plans I would start seeing my accomplishments as steps on a ladder, evidence of my stick-to-it-ive-ness, rather than flukes. Maybe I would grow into a more sturdy and mature person on all fronts, complete with home and kin and career and Chardonnay.

Maybe without a plan, events just seem to happen, by chance or coincidence rather than effort or exertion, and so don’t count (at least for me) as much or at all. Maybe that’s why I feel like everything up to this point has been composed of stuff-that-happened to me rather than a real life that’s been governed by me. Maybe these are the revelations that will set me on a path and inspire me to create a plan. Maybe all I need is a change of perspective. Maybe.

Or maybe I’ll just keep waiting for my switch to flip. And maybe that’s life.

* And clearly I assume that that’s how adults think and interact with other adults.

-Jessica Balmer

Jessica Balmer is a freelance writer and the Reviews Editor for Shameless magazine. Her writing has been published in Bitch, TROT, The London Free Press, VOICE, and the forthcoming anthology Becoming Feminists, among others. She has an MA in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research and a BA in Media, Information, and Technoculture & Women’s Studies from the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include feminism(s) and/in pop culture, with a particular focus on women’s contributions to culture jamming. She blogs at You Discussed Me and is perpetually waiting to grow up.

GenMeh celebrates its first birthday today! An entire year of pep talks and pedantry under my belt, who could have predicted it?

So, in the interests of self-indulgence, I made a little video* to mark the occasion (it’s out of sync for the first 20 seconds only). I respectfully request that you ignore the bags under my eyes; sleep and I have been on the outs for months now.  Also, I should clarify that gluten-free vegan cupcakes are ordinarily delicious. Full blame goes to my baking prowess in this case.

And yes, if you were expecting the stern ghost of Susan B. Anthony and are instead smitten with my wholesome chirpiness, you should totally let me know.

Happy Birthday, GenMeh! from Generation Meh on Vimeo.

*First and only take and no script. That’s how I roll.

Imagine 25 people (strangers, even) all staring at you while they throw out words and terms to describe their perceptions of you and then more words and terms for areas you need to work on. And you just have to sit there and absorb it. That was my Sunday. It was challenging. Not because I was surprised by what words came up, (I could have predicted most of them), but the not being able to argue or defend myself or explain why when you say you see A, it’s really B. I took it less personally than others, just crawled into the mental storm cellar, closed the hatch and waited until it was safe to pop my head back out.  I did appreciate that the feedback was framed in terms of what qualities the group recognized that you possess and wanted to see more of from you and not simply telling you to be less timid/pushy/loud/insert adjective here.

Photo by confidence, comely.

The end result of the exercise (only a few of us got the full group treatment, the rest had their profiling in clusters of four or five) was that everyone ended up with a name tag that had a word or descriptor to dictate how you should conduct yourself for the rest of the day. Mine was one of the few name tags that called on the bearer to emphasize softness, vulnerability and touchy feely stuff (the older man who ended up with Casanova also comes to mind). The majority focused on encouraging participants to be bolder, more assertive, more selfish, more confident (Tiger! Xena! Wonder Woman! Boxer!). I couldn’t help but be a little jealous. It seemed a much easier task to simply front as if you have natural swagger than shift into nurturing earth mother mode if that doesn’t come naturally.

The point of the exercise was about achieving a balance. We’re all adept at tapping into and projecting certain aspects of our character. Call it our comfort zone, wheelhouse, whatever. But we’re more than that narrow range, the name tags were meant to assert. Venturing farther afield to bring out child-like wonder or no-nonsense straight-talking might feel foreign or artificial, but it’s possible. Those capacities are underdeveloped and maybe even undiscovered, but we can go there and doing so in a space where we won’t be called out or socially penalized for getting it wrong or screwing up is absolutely the right context for taking the first few halting steps in this direction. That safety for fail-proof experimentation is a luxury I wish more people had access to.

And that’s where I come in. Our whole lives are spent attempting to be in the world and to figure out what that looks like for us when it comes to relationships, jobs, self-esteem, etc. Is it making ourselves as small as possible, trying to fly under the radar and praying that we won’t be tramped all over or singled out? Is it puffing our chests out, peeing all over every telephone pole, fire hydrant and shrub in our path to mark our territory and rush to define ourselves before anyone can do that for us? The colonized or the colonizer? I know now that what I want to do, what I feel absolutely compelled to do is to work with people to support them in striking a balance (i.e., you don’t have to be the imperialist or the conquered. Maybe a nice Canada or Switzerland instead?) and defining/designing that space for themselves  in a concrete, positive, practical way and without jargon, new age BS or patronizing affirmations. What does okay look like and what will it take to get you there? What do you need to feel at ease in the world and how can we work together to get you those resources? How can I help YOU? Working with people to answer these questions is what’s most important to me right now. It’s what I want to do, what I feel (oh God, do I have a heart after all?) I need to do.

And that realization was so worth wearing a silly name tag for a few hours.

*Okay, I lied. No hugs here. Yet.