Generation Meh

A former coworker once forced me to read The Secret. Believe it or not, I am occasionally reluctant to hurt people’s feelings, so when she came into my office singing the book’s praises, I tried to listen with an open mind. She told me how she had declared her intention to meet a man a by a certain date and, wouldn’t you know, the Universe sent her one a few days before the deadline. I refrained from speculating that she subconsciously felt the deadline looming and latched onto the first Mr. OMG Right Now who passed by in order to justify her faith in the book, because I’m not a totally terrible person. Long story short, she gave me her copy to borrow over a long weekend and I agreed to read it, which I did because A) all a girl’s got in this world is her word (especially after her looks fade) and B) I assumed there would be a quiz on the contents.

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Y’all know me well enough by now to guess that I didn’t end up being a fan of thinking your way to abundance. Actually, after my coworker left the organization and we fell out of touch, I more or less forgot about The Secret.  I was reminded of it, however, a couple of weeks ago when Brazen Careerist featured a blog post by someone touting the merits of the book’s philosophy, then again during a recent spate of solicited advice giving and finally during a discussion of this article on the effects of social relationships on life span at one of my internet haunts. The reason The Secret came to mind was the  applicability in these conversations of the one idea in the book (and a throwaway one at that) that I felt had any merit  –  the need to create the context that supports what you want your life to be like. The advice isn’t unique to The Secret, of course. Every list of diet tips ever no doubt exhorts you to keep only “healthy” food in your kitchen to avoid the “temptation” to gorge on Cheetos or order takeout Thai from the comfort of your couch. And certainly The Secret took it to a weirdly unsettling extreme ( I vaguely remember a woman who only slept on one side of her bed and emptied out one side of her closet as a signal to the Universe that she was ready for it to send her her proverbial other half – creepy).

But the idea that your immediate surroundings and routines should support your goals and desires instead of opposing them is a solid one. I might desperately want a dog, but if I live on the 26th floor of a pet-free highrise smack in the middle of Manhattan, well, that isn’t exactly a Fido-friendly lifestyle is it? Or if you’d dearly love to be coupled up, but work 16-hour days and spent your weekends restoring furniture in your basement all alone, is it any wonder that you’re single? If all you want in life is to be the next Meryl Streep, would you settle for crossing your fingers and hoping that Scorsese might stop by to catch you in a Des Moines dinner theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and whisk you off to Hollywood to star next to Leonardo DiCaprio in a prime piece of Oscar bait? No, you would not. And if you did/do, you’re hopelessly naive and probably going to end up on the casting couch of a sleazy pseudo “agent” who doubles as a muffler salesman. I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

Your actions have to match your intentions, or you’re not going to get any closer to what you want. Willing it to happen won’t work. Ditto, pining, sighing, daydreaming, cutting out little pictures and sticking them on a board or confining yourself to one side of the bed (What about people whose beds are so small they don’t have sides? What about them, writers of The Secret?). You don’t have to get all slick and finger-gunned out (and as a champion of the organic, I would advise against that anyway), but you do have to get your head in the game and give a little in order to get. Few of us are in a position that employers, prospective paramours, elite colleges and Hollywood directors are politely lining up at our doors to recruit us into awesomeness (Luckily, we’re not besieged with skeevy muffler salesmen, either). We have to at least meet ’em halfway (which isn’t Des Moines, btw) by focusing on the factors in our lives that are within our control and that we can change to better reflect our wants. And it can start with baby steps. Maybe it’s volunteering at an animal shelter to get a taste for whether you have the temperament for pet ownership. Maybe it’s scouring the internet for other like-minded locals interested in restoring vintage furniture to hang out with on the weekends and getting away from the solitary varnish fumes. Maybe it’s realizing that being a transgendered aspiring urban planner means that you may have to move away from where you grew up in rural Kentucky in order to access a fuller scope of opportunities.

Bottom line? If you’re longing for something other than your current reality, you’ve gotta make the way you live support the way you want to live. And there’s no secret to that.

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.