Generation Meh

“So, where are you heading after this?”

“To my shrink’s,” I reply with a laugh.

My business associate asks me to confirm he heard correctly and then starts laughing, too. And then he tells me about his own experience with therapy after he went bankrupt a few years ago.

For a long time, the longest time in fact, I thought that the value I brought to relationships was my steadfast unflappability. If you were friends with me, I’m sure it was like having McGyver (with better hair) on speed dial. And then, one day, I couldn’t do that anymore. I looked around at all the feelings and facets of my life I’d been neglecting and I realized that my dogged devotion to helping other people fix their stuff (whether they asked me to or not) meant that most of mine remained broken.

As I told someone yesterday, the last six months of my life have been incredibly humbling. For a person who has always believed her core value lies in her strength, admitting to being vulnerable is hard. It’s possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Asking for help, for compassion, for forgiveness, for support is an ongoing struggle. Being able to acknowledge my needs and present them to someone else in the timid hope that they might be met is like climbing Mount Everest to me – right down to the lightheadedness and lack of oxygen.

So, why am I doing this? Why am I asking for things I know I won’t get and going away with my head bowed? Why am I fighting panic to meet strangers for coffee or telling my pride to STFU and reaching out to a friend for reassurance that I’m doing okay? Why am I  reviving my book proposal and considering stand-up comedy and blogging acutely personal details that would make the me of a year ago wince? Because none of those things will kill me. For every risk I force myself to take, I get a little stronger and a little wiser and the tears dry a little faster. I might not get what I want, but I do get the knowledge that I won’t die from not having it and then, when I need to do something similar in the future, I call upon that memory and it bolsters me. I’m very tired of being scared and the quickest way to stop being scared is to do the scary thing and then live to tell about it in technicolor detail. So, here we go.

And there is a relief in this new way of being, in the ability to shrug off the mantle of perfect composure to admit incompetence and fear and confusion, to acknowledge that not only do you not know best, sometimes, you really don’t know anything at all. I am a mess. We all are. Now, I strive to be gracious when others offer compassion and kindness and generosity in the face of the weakness or need I show them. Of course, I worry about losing my place in their lives if I’m no longer the unflappable fixer, but I remind myself that even if that were to happen, I am building the capacity to deal with it via every risk I push myself to take and every weakness I steel myself to show. And then I just continue not dying from it.

My father has a theory about used cars. Don’t buy one with under 60K miles on it. If something major is going to go wrong with the car and need to be repaired, it will happen before 60K and, in that case, why not let the previous owner foot the bill for those repairs? After 60K, the major kinks are worked out and you’re probably getting a decent – albeit not low mileage –  vehicle. A friend and I were discussing this theory on the way to Enterprise yesterday to pick up a rental car for a work trip she was going on. Of course, the conversation swung around to relationships, as it often does.

My dad’s car advice applies to people as well. There’s no need to be scared of folks with a few miles on their souls. Eventually, we all get rust spots and loose fan belts and the exhaust starts to go. If you opt for shiny and new, know that you’re going to be the one who’s on the hook for those needed psychic repairs at some point in the future. Maybe you’re fine with that and maybe helping someone else fight through their growing pains into full adulthood is more of a responsibility than you’re willing to shoulder. If you choose a pre-loved model instead, a lot of that work has – ideally – been done for you. You’re missing out on whatever the human equivalent of that seductive new car smell is, but you’re meeting someone at the point where they’ve already made a lot of their mistakes, learned lessons the hard way and have settled into the self they intend to be for the next forty or fifty years. Maybe that isn’t a self you want to be with, but you can at least be reasonably confident that it’s a pretty solidly defined one.

With people and with vehicles, it’s all about trade-offs and where your priorities lie when it comes to allocating your limited budget. Four-wheel drive vs. sun roof. Kindness vs. ambition. Style vs. efficiency. And sometimes, it pays to skip next year’s model in the showroom and put your faith in a tried-and-true workhorse. Just don’t forget to renew your AAA membership.

Also, sometimes, I worry that I take my eyeliner to an Avril Lavigne level, so it’s nice to be validated that I haven’t ventured into raccoon territory.

After a minor bout of worry over the possibility that you might be a professional colleague, married or possibly fresh out of high school, I’ve decided that’s pretty irrelevant to the fact that your posting made my day – unless you’re trying to recruit me into your underground polygamist sect, in which case, no thank you, sir.

Please note that I will have a little extra bounce in my step (and it’s not just my still aching ankle) this week and that I will be side-eyeing all the men of my acquaintance – both online and offline – for a clue as to who you are and how we might know one another.

Thanks again, stranger.

All the very best,

JMH

I once had a boyfriend who took no end of delight in making joking asides about the rugged, austere and highly frugal stock he assumed I was descended from – people who performed their own amputations, sewed their clothes out of burlap, gave birth in the field and then went back to digging up turnips with their bare hands, etc.  And as much as his mocking irritated me, the truth is that the only way I could have been more steeped in the Protestant work ethic while growing up is if I had been raised by Martin Luther himself. Although, it should be noted that my understanding of the value of hard work is entirely secular in nature, which probably makes it even more baffling. But man, has it been my saving grace this year*.

A friend and I are working on a collaboration. She’s actually a friend I couldn’t have had five years ago, or even two years ago. We’re wildly different in a lot of ways (and not just because her hair is as crazily curly as mine is stick-straight) and utterly complementary in a lot of others. Before, the differences would have made me feel anxious and insecure. I would have been second-guessing myself and wondering if her way of being was better than my way and angsting out over not being 100% understood, validated and endorsed for WHO I WAS. Ye gods, am I glad those days are behind me.

So, we’re working on a collaboration and we just can’t seem to nail down THE thing. We have good ideas that are interesting and marketable and play to our strengths, but there’s just something missing. We haven’t hit the jackpot yet, even though we have folks who will pay us for our work. After a call a couple of days ago wherein we discussed yet another avenue to explore, we agreed to regroup later in the week after we’d both mulled over the details. Something didn’t sit right, though, so I shot my friend another email: 

What I think is also worth giving thought to is identifying what each of us REALLY want to do in our lives. Not what we like or are good at or can make money from, but what we’d want to be doing work-wise if those things weren’t part of the equation at all and then brainstorming about whether A) there is a self-supporting angle to that and B) whether there’s an intersection in our two things and a way to help each other achieve them. A little new age-y, but I think we could handle it;)

Even if it was as simple as:

I like to do X
I don’t like to do Y
I bring Z to the table

that means we have a really clear sense of all the bases we collectively cover and what exactly a collaboration of our personalities/skill sets brings to the world.

WE COULD EVEN MAKE A VENN DIAGRAM.

And then, this afternoon, I received an eerily prescient email blast from the scarily talented Erika Lyremark. The message included a question that more or less boiled down to “What’s holding you back?” and an invitation to respond with your answer. I did and within minutes, Erika replied. We chatted by phone and, as she is gifted at doing, she nailed my issue in 90 seconds flat. “You’re a business whore. You keep getting seduced by throw rugs. If you keep going after the low-hanging fruit, you’ll always be stuck in this spot.” If there’s a way for being punched in the stomach to feel good, this would be it.

What I love to do more than anything else is to tell stories – to take ideas or bullet points or nebulous feelings and spin whole narratives out of them. I love to go hunting for information and sources and perspectives (the more diverse, the better) and then compose them into a cohesive whole that you read and absorb and think about and respond to. I love taking topics that you would think would never in a million years lend themselves to interesting stories and turning them fascinating tales. I love working with people and companies to help them identify what aspects of their work absolutely need to be shared with the world and then guiding them to where and how to do that sharing. LOVE IT. And I don’t do enough of it. There are a million (give or take) absolutely rational reasons why, but they can all be neatly classified under the heading of fear – fear of failure, of rejection, of powerlessness, of vulnerability.

My friend and I have talked a lot about “low-hanging fruit” lately in an attempt to figure out where the most accessible, easily-won market for our combined talents might be. It makes a lot of practical sense, obviously, but it doesn’t make emotional sense and it’s not lighting either of us up, no matter how much we try to sell ourselves on it. There is, as my call with Erika forced me to acknowledge, a better, truer way, it’s just not necessarily the  easy path I was hoping for. And now that I’ve admitted as much, sticking to only the apples within arm’s reach doesn’t really seem like such a solid long-term strategy anymore.