You have to save yourself. Not Jesus, not Buddha, not Dr. Oz, not a new job or your next relationship. You can get help – get therapy, get a dietician, get an education – but you’re still the one who has to sign on the dotted line. It’s both liberating and terrifying to contemplate. I can rescue myself and if I don’t, I’ll sink to the bottom of the Atlantic faster than the Titanic.

And it comes down to choice.

There is a difference between choosing not to do something and being genuinely unable to manage it. Is my body physically capable of running a marathon? Yes. Have I chosen to commit the time and effort required to train it to perform this task competently? No.  It’s not that I can’t run one, I just don’t choose to do what it takes to run one. Most of the things we believe we can’t do and we tell ourselves we can’t do fall into this same category. There are very, very few examples of achievements or undertaking that are just impossible for us, end of story. I can’t fly. We can’t cure cancer. You can’t grow three inches taller as an adult.

We always have choices; it’s just that some of the choices are difficult or time-consuming or unpalatable or labor-intensive, so we’d rather pretend they don’t exist. We do a quick mental cost-benefit analysis, decide we’re not willing to spend what is required and deem whatever it is beyond the scope of our abilities to tackle and then we sleep easier at night. Harsh, but true. I genuinely worried that removing that safeguard of being able to say I simply couldn’t manage X from my own thinking would lead to a tidal wave of guilt. If I could do all the things and I wasn’t doing all the things, clearly I was slacking.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, in recent weeks, I’ve started shifting my mindset away from looking a life as a capricious and overwhelming storm and me as a rag doll it tosses around. I’ve been realizing that I’ve been giving away my power and my agency by telling myself a story in which I have no choices and all of my actions are reactive and instinctual rather than deliberate and thoughtful. I have to do X. I wish I had the strength for Y, but I just don’t. Contrast that with I could be doing A, B or C, but for the present, X meets my immediate needs. This doesn’t mean it is a long-term commitment; I can reassess its value whenever I want and/or change course. How much more empowering is it to say, “My immediate needs are shelter, food and student loan payments. My job provides me with the capacity to meet these needs, therefore I choose to commit my time to working at it” than it is to say, “I hate my job, but I can’t find anything else. The economy sucks and I’m just stuck here.”

In both cases, you’re working at a job that is less than ideal, but in the first example, you’re asserting your agency and acknowledging this is a choice you make in order to derive certain benefits and in the second, you’re denying your agency and casting yourself as a victim of circumstances who needs outside intervention to succeed. Guess which version of you sleeps better every Sunday night?

Waiting around for rescue is demoralizing and anxiety-inducing. You feel as if your happiness is at the mercy of the universe’s benevolence and a dose of blind luck and you have no way of predicting when or even if you’ll ever be graced with either. The best you can do is squint at the horizon and hope to see the Coast Guard. And that’s why it’s just as maddening as it is relieving when you snap out of it one day and realize that this whole damn time you’ve been sitting on the pile of boards that you could jury-rig together to make a raft to float yourself off this sad desert island for good. Sure, you might have to use a coconut as an improvised hammer, but you have the carpentry skills to make it work.  We all do. You have to save yourself. No one else will do it for you. Start building.

My parents have two dogs. The old one is lethargic and entitled, but the younger one is a survivor. She can left herself out of the house, do her business and then come back to the door and bark to be let in. She can use her paw to sweep food scraps from the counter directly into her mouth. You can throw a single popcorn kernel 10 feet in the air and she can catch it. My parents joke that they could go away for a week and leave the dog to fend for herself and she’d not only have fed herself the entire time, she’d probably figure out how to start a fire in the fireplace, too.

I’m like that dog. Exactly, like that dog. I have always been self-sufficient. The little girl who never needed help with her math homework grew up to be the young woman whose boss frequently jokes that she’ll steal his job. I always have money in the bank. I am a model employee. I will give you reasoned, practical advice about your problems and I will never ask for anything in return. Get rewarded and lauded for your ability to take care of business enough and you start to believe that’s the value you bring to relationships. You start to believe that your self-sufficiency is what people must like best about you and if you take that away or let it slip, that people will abandon you. If you are not able to solve all your own problems and theirs too and to do it all with a smile on your face, you aren’t worth bothering with. Your value is in doing and not just being and if you stop doing, there goes your value. It’s a sad, miserly way to look at human relationships and absolutely impossible to live up to. Just because I never ask, doesn’t mean I don’t need support or attention or help, as much as I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise.

But because I’ve never learned to ask for support or attention or help, I’m laughably bad at it now – a time when I could badly use all of them. A lifetime of training myself to jury-rig a solo solution has left me pretty ill-equipped to request a little emotional assistance. Where someone else might be able to communicate, “I’ve had a terrible week. I just want to veg out. Do you want to come over and watch movies?” in actual words, I can only do the equivalent of an infant wailing in her crib. Why yes, I am teething, but I can’t get that point across. All I can do is scream myself red in the face and hope that people can parse the true meaning from these often non sequitur outbursts. Not very healthy and not very effective.

I’m getting better, though. Yesterday was a pretty terrible day, but I managed to reach out to two friends, one old and one new. The old one reminded me that we’ve been close for a decade and she has my back no matter what. And the new one asked me if I wanted to talk. Instead of brushing it off and telling her I was fine, I said that yes, actually I WOULD like to talk. We chatted for an hour about personal branding BS, the journo life and Jeffrey Dahmer. It helped.

I keep reminding myself of eulogies when I struggle with being able to ask, to expect, to accept. Have you ever heard the recently deceased praised for his self-sufficiency? Bob was a man who always handled his own business. Bob never asked anything of his fellow man. Bob never burdened others with a need for companionship or support. Of course not. Being an island is not a praiseworthy quality. Being too proud or scared to ask for help is not something to be celebrated; it’s something to be pitied. We relate to each other on the basis of our flaws, our weaknesses and our needs even more than we do our triumphs and our successes. I have just as many of the former as the latter. And it’s about time I shared them. In fact, I need to.

You wouldn’t think it if you looked at the bottom of my purse, but I’m not much of a collector. A person who can’t be bothered to throw out empty packs of gum or appointment cards for a haircut that was four months ago, yes, but not by nature a treasurer of valuable or sentimental things.

Ideas are the exception.  When I read Gina Barreca’s piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I recognized myself. I am indeed an idea hoarder. I cling out of the belief that the time for these ideas will eventually come. Circumstances will align, the perfect collaborators will appear and I will finally have an unsullied block of time – and the accompanying energy – to devote to a given brainwave.  No matter how impractical, never-to-be-acted-upon or out-of-vogue a bygone creative whim might be, I am loath to part with it. Someday, I might use rolls of drawer lining to make it look like one of my living room walls is wood-paneled. I might start to develop that coaching program that combines international travel and encouraging women to take more risks. I might finally, finally submit that book proposal about battling your quarter-life crisis and winning. Someday.  Maybe?

These unexecuted plans and projects are a security blanket. They make us feel creative and inspired and purposeful. Ideas represent potential. They represent opportunities and alternate futures and hypothetical riches and a better state of being. They’re your ace-in-the-hole, your Hail Mary pass, your retirement plan. Giving up these ideas means giving up all of the hope we attach to them. It feels like giving up on yourself as a doer and not just a dreamer.

But the longer I hold onto these scraps of half-baked plans, the worse I feel. When I realize the domain I bought with the best of intentions is about to lapse unused or I see someone else celebrating a book deal when I’ve yet to start approaching agents, or when I think about promising joint ventures that started out hot and heavy only to fizzle when both sides got wrapped up in urgent day-to-day tasks, I feel like a failure. Sure, I’ve accomplished other things in the interim, but those pale in comparison to what-might-have beens that didn’t happen.

I have to let go and so do you. I’ve been hoarding these ideas because I’m afraid I won’t ever have another good one and because I’ve been too stubborn to admit that I’m simply not cut out for some of the things my brain dreams up.  Not only am I closing myself off to new bursts of inspiration (which will come; they always do), I’m also associating creativity with disappointment and failure (I could have done x, but I didn’t). By letting go of old ideas and plans,  you also start to separate yourself from the weighty guilt that comes from being confronted with unrealized ambitions in the form of others’ successes. It feels freeing to stop trying to nag yourself into action. It takes a lot of strength of mind to admit that while an idea is good, you don’t feel called to pursue it strongly enough that you’re willing to invest the resources required to bring it to fruition. There’s no shame in making new priorities.

But that book proposal? Oh, that will get done.

A piece in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye the other day – a third of New Yorkers are now spending over half their income on rent. Think about New York. Think about what an amazing city it is. Now, think about handing over 50% of your pay check to a landlord every month.

It reminded me that everything comes with a catch, a fly in the ointment, a little bitter with your sweet. You get offered a great job, but it means you have to move to a suburb of Bloomington, Indiana. You meet your perfect match, but she’s committed to being child-free. You can grow up to be an artist, but you still have to work retail. Even when you get what you want, you can’t control the form it comes in or the baggage it brings with it.

Being happy is  so often about making difficult choices and being content with and accepting of the outcomes. It’s sitting down and doing the hard math – do the good things outweigh the bad things in this situation? If they do, you just might have to accept the downsides and trade-offs as a corollary of being an imperfect person in an unfair world.  We’ve all got a little sand mixed into our sugar.

The goal is not to have it all. The goal is to have what makes you happy. But you also have to accept that that happiness won’t be a 24/7 kind of deal and that everything comes with a cost. You can haggle and bargain all you want (and you should), but whether you’re paying in dollars, time, energy or forfeited opportunity, there are always going to be bills to settle. Once you get your head around this reality, finessing what you’ve got (vs. gambling on the possibility of a yet-to-be-discovered better option) starts to make a whole lot of sense.

So, yes, you can live in NYC, but it means sharing a three-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint and never having more than $50 in disposable income to your name for the foreseeable future.

The choice is up to you.

What would happen if you actually accomplished everything you thought you should? How would you feel then?

One of my wisest friends asks that question after I tell her about how I almost ruined this weekend’s trip to NYC with my single-minded focus on doing and seeing everything possible in the shortest amount of time, getting overwhelmed by the possibilities, not pursuing any of them and then getting angry at myself for “failing” at taking a vacation. If that sounds ridiculous, it is. And if I sound like a less than swell person to travel with, well, just ask the non-platonic person in my life. He didn’t abandon me at the base of the Empire State Building, but would have been fully justified in doing so.

I tend to think this is a particularly Millennial affliction and not simply just my neurotic cross to bear. The idea of having limitless potential with which many of us were indoctrinated from an early age means that you can be anything you want when you grow up. It also means that, by its very nature, it’s impossible to fulfill. You can’t reach the limit of limitless, but damned if I (we) don’t try. Ambition is an excellent quality to have, but ambition without focus, without perspective, without self-care will grind you into the ground. Trust me. Last month, I interviewed Ben Folds, I wrote a 10 000-word ebook for Forbes and Hyperink in a week and I spoke on NPR about commencement speech wisdom for the class of 2012. I felt accomplished for exactly six and a half minutes and then went right back to my default state of wondering what was next and fretting over needing to do or be more. Exactly what goes into “more” is left infuriatingly undefined, obviously.

And my trip to New York ended up falling prey to that mindset. Never mind that I had to get up at 3:00 AM on Saturday to make my flight, I should have pushed myself to head straight to Coney Island from LaGuardia. And there was no reason I couldn’t tackle the Met, the MoMA and a Broadway show in one day, is there? And meet friends for drinks afterward? Yes, there is – it’s called sanity. And also, the limits of your body and the 24-hour clock.

There will never be enough time and enough energy and there will always be too many mountains. This is the truth. You (and I) cannot do all of the things and be all of the things and have all of the things. It is not possible. Not in this lifetime and not in 10 lifetimes. And believing that it is (with just a little more effort, a little more time, a little more motivation) is not only maddening, it’s an exhausting, disordered way to run your existence. It means that you can’t appreciate the things that you do achieve because you always have your eye on what’s next. It means you can’t set goals, because you can’t narrow down your focus to only one or two big projects and be content with those. It means that you always feel  ravenously hungry and unfulfilled. And it means that you are a lousy person to vacation with.

When your answers to What would happen if you actually accomplished everything you thought you should? How would you feel then? are “nothing” and “still unsatisfied,” you know you need to make some changes.
Just not all of the changes and not all at once.