Let Go

I flipped Adam off this morning before I left for work. I didn’t mean to, I swear. For some strange reason, I decided to flash him two-fisted “rock on” hands (as demonstrated hilariously in this site) with my arms over my head as I was walking out the door this morning. This alone would be cause for alarm, but instead, my hands did what I was actually feeling towards the world, and I threw up two middle fingers and walked out the door without explanation or even a vague awareness of what I had done.

And the PMS train rolls on. Today’s casualties include not only a third box of Triscuits, but also two pounds of cherries and two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This is among the rich, rational myriad of reasons I’m truly terrified to become pregnant. I see 100 pound weight gains in my future, because something else took hold of my body while I was eating those cherries. My mind was saying “No! NO! Put them down!” and my heart was saying something totally different, as there is a pile of pits next to my wine as tall as the end table.

I also sunk further into the depths of hormonal despair and found myself crying at a restaurant named Porky’s (in the Everglades, no less. Adam kept screeching, “YOU CANNOT CRY IN PORKY’S. PLEASE.”) while I regaled Adam that I was a woeful failure in life, as my salary is somewhere in the range of the high peanuts since I gave up my corporate career. And then we’ll move back to Massachusetts and I will be forced to get a job at Big Lots because no other newspaper will have me, and so I spent the day (the DAY) searching for freelancing jobs so that I could write people’s resumes, random copy and, I don’t know, help a Nigerian national figure out how to get his funds back in the United States just so that I wouldn’t have to go back to Big Lots and I could earn my keep.

God, I haven’t learned anything. Funny how you can change circumstances, but you can’t change the person. I felt like a failure when I was working all those hours at my last job because I wasn’t living my life and I wasn’t being the best corporate drone imaginable and I thought if I didn’t do it perfectly every day, I would lose something. If I didn’t kill myself and make it as miserable as possible, then I wasn’t achieving what I needed to achieve.

Not much has changed. Sure, I’m less anxious about some stuff – maybe I now know that the world won’t end if I make a mistake, or if I don’t work 100 hours a day. But I’m still yanked out to the point of obsession that I’m not doing enough to be successful as a human being, in some sort of strange, elusive definition of success that only I can explain or define. I write a column for a publication with a circulation of 50,000, and I’m still not happy with it. I should be doing more. I should be king of the newspaper business after a mere six months of this, and have finished five books by now, and have no fewer than six professional blogging gigs, in addition to various and sundry freelance writing projects in order to call myself a successful writer and/or person because anything less is just cheating.

In other words, I’m good at setting realistic goals for myself. Clearly, I still don’t know what it means to be successful. Is it leaving the world a better place than you found it? Meeting some strict set of personal goals? Working until you drop, or until someone else says you’ve made it?

And then I remember that a year ago, I never could have imagined what I’d be doing. That I’d be a professional writer and editor. That I’d have a dog. That I’d be a little (a little. A LITTLE) closer to having a baby. And that I should honestly just shut the fuck up and go get the ice cream and peanut butter and see where life takes me.

But gah. I CAN’T. Send beef jerky.

*Frou Frou

14 comments July 17th, 2006