Our lives don’t follow straight paths. We’re more like messages in bottles, bobbing along with the current, bouncing off rocks and getting thrown in new directions. Except it’s not as fatalistic as all that — we do have some control over the bobbing. We can look around and see a direction that looks pretty good and head that way. At those times, we control the path, but we still don’t control the destination. For that, we’d need to be able to climb into a helicopter and scope out where that direction actually takes us and decide before the journey if that’s really where we wanted to end up. And, we’d need something to clear the way to make sure we didn’t hit something that bounced us back or sideways or around. And if have the helicopter, then why the hell would we go back to bobbing anyway? But we don’t. Have the helicopter that is.

So, sometimes, our lives change because something we could never have expected, some chance thing that maybe didn’t even seem that important at the time. And sometimes we see our lives changing before us, and we know that the decision is a fork in the road. But even then we don’t know exactly where it will lead us.

So, is life an adventure or a gamble? Something new around every corner or a nail-biting spin of the roulette wheel? Yeah, I know. It’s both.

I weigh my decisions so carefully. What will happen if I choose this? And what about that? And I agonize and try to imagine the outcome and factor in the variables and it’s exhausting. And you just never know. And as much as I agonize over the big stuff, at any time, something small can come right around the corner and change everything.

If I didn’t get laid off way back when, I wouldn’t have looked for another job and I wouldn’t have met P. and I wouldn’t have him in my life now. And I can’t imagine my life without him. But meeting him was not something I could have planned even though he is the most important thing in my life.

How’s that for making the right decisions for a happy life?

And what about my career? I became a technical writer because all I wanted to do with my life was write and the only major I ever considered was English, but then I got my degree and wanted to write and couldn’t get a job in journalism, didn’t really want a job in journalism, which is why I looked into, but didn’t stay in a Communications major or work on the school newspaper. But I was working at a hardware store and I never imagined I would have my degree and still be working there, but then I saw an opening for a technical writer at that hardware store’s corporate office and it was writing as a career! And I already knew the subject matter since I’d been working at the store all through school. And I’ve been a technical writer ever since. But I never knew the career existed. And I never would have gotten the job if I hadn’t started working at the hardware store.

Which I never would have done except that I got offered a theatre internship the summer after my freshman year. And so I had to quit my job at Mervyn’s. Which I only did because they said they’d hire me back in the fall. Because I needed that job. But when I got back after the internship, Mervyn’s said they didn’t have any openings. And so I got a job at a bagel shop. Only they wanted me to make espresso drinks but never explained how to use the machine. And the whole heating up the milk thing scared me. And I didn’t know how to brew the coffee. And I cut the bagels wrong and the boss yelled at me. So, after less than a week, I got a job at a bakery and called up the bagel shop and said I wasn’t coming in anymore. But then I hated the bakery job because no one told me what any of the baked goods were called. And so customers would come in and say they wanted six of this and eight of that and I would make them point things out behind the glass because I didn’t know what they wanted. And I had to decorate cakes so they said happy birthday to people I didn’t know how to decorate cakes and I was really bad at it and I cried every day. So after a less than a week I found the hardware job.

So, if I was better at making coffee or decorating cakes, I might not be a technical writer now. And although I didn’t end up working in the theatre, maybe that internship had more influence over the course of my life than I thought.

But despite all of that, I still agonize over every decision I can control. It’s hard for me to let go. It’s hard for me to remember that sometimes the best twists and turns in life come from not being able to decorate a cake.

The other day, when I was writing about the thing I never write about, I mentioned that I’ve thus far lost about 15 pounds. And for me that must be the magic number at which it becomes noticeable because I’ve had a bunch of people ask me if I’ve lost weight in the last week or so. So, that’s really great, except that the compliments have been very suspicious.

“I don’t want you to think that I’ve been staring at your ass, but it looks great!” (This from a female friend. She then looked at P. and said, “I hope you don’t mind that I’m staring at your girlfriend’s ass,” and he said, “Not at all! Please continue!”)

“I have the opposite body type that you do. I carry all my weight up top.” (This from a female coworker.)

And the kicker:

“You’ve lost 15 pounds? My God. You’ve lost it all from your ass!” (From another female coworker.)

All of which tells me that I have no breasts and an enormous ass. No weight up top! All the weight on the bottom! I’m surprised my ass has been fitting through doorways based on these remarks. The funny thing is that while I generally am aware of which areas of my body are my more attractive parts and which could use a little work, I had no idea about my ass. I never look at my own ass, as true study would require mirrors set up in careful geometric angles, which would be way too much work for me to arrange. (The avoidance of work being what got my ass into this situation in the first place.)

So, now I spend my time in the mirror twisted around like a pretzel, hoping to see if I’m continuing to make progress in the ass region. I would ask P., but for some reason completely unknown to me, when I ask him if my ass is fat he runs from the room and refuses to come back until I agree to “stop tricking” him with my land mine-style questions. But I am so totally not tricking him. I just want him to tell me if my ass is fat. So I can stop twisting around like a crazy person and squeezing my ass to see if I can figure out just how huge it is. There’s no trick there.

Maybe I should ask him about the breast thing too, just to get his take on it. He couldn’t possibly think that’s a trick question, right?

There’s a conspiracy in Hollywood. I don’t know that I’ve unearthed some great secret, because surely everyone knows. Maybe the relevant players have all been paid off with blow jobs or something, I don’t know. But it’s become this huge elephant in the room that no one ever talks about. And it gets worse every day.

I am talking about the fact that there are maybe five actual actors in Hollywood, and in addition to playing roles in movies, they play roles as other actors! By pretending you are two or three people, rather than just one, you can make up to three times the cash! I totally get why people do it. What I don’t get is how they get away with it.

Take for instance the actor known as both Gary Sinise and Vince Vaughn. I could tell his personas apart when one of them played serious roles, like for instance, paralyzed Vietnam Vet, and one of them competed at being the most irritating person on earth, namely supporting roles in Ben Stiller movies. But now sometimes the serious veteran is Ben Stiller’s sidekick. And this amalgam actor person even has had the audacity to put both of his personas in the same movie! This is when I know things have gone too far. The level of coverup is vast for anything like this to be possible.

And then there’s the girl known both as Natalie Portman and Keira Knightly. What’s she playing at? P. thinks Keira Knightly is actually Brooke Shields’ astrally projected younger self, but I’m talking about serious facts here, not some fantasy. Although I haven’t seen Brooke Shields around lately, maybe we’re seeing someone attempt a hat trick, creating two additional personas — both with younger and hotter bodies! And fewer eyebrows!

And what about Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, passing himself off as a gay chef on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? We all saw you in Twister. We know you can’t cook.

And who has ever seen Jerry O’Connell and Jason Bateman in the same room? I tell you no one has, unless it was a room of mirrors.

P. didn’t believe my conspiracy theory. Until last night. A commercial for that new Drew Barrymore movie about baseball came on.

“I hate that guy.” I said.

P. looked at me. “Mike Myers? You hate Mike Myers?”

“That’s not Mike Myers. That’s that other SNL guy. That really annoying one.”

“Mike Myers.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

I looked it up on IMDB. “It’s Jimmy Fallon.”

“Who the hell is Jimmy Fallon? I’ve never heard of him before.”

“Yes, you have. He was just in that taxi movie with Queen Latifah.”

“That was Mike Myers.”

“Dude. It was not.”

He looked at the pictures on IMDB.

“No. Mike Myers acts out roles a lot. He’s always playing other characters. This “Jimmy Fallon” is just another character — him as a skinny person.”

Finally, he seemed to give in. We went back to watching TV. About a half hour later, I saw him looking at me. Just staring.

“What?”

“It’s Mike Myers, really, right?”

Something I don’t understand: why there is such a huge industry devoted to dieting (pills, books, tapes, plans, whatever) and yet no restaurants, fast or otherwise, devoted to healthful food. Well, “no” restaurants is probably pushing it. There are a few, if you search hard enough, but even with those you might be assured vegan food or vegetarian food or whatever, and not necessarily low-fat, low-calorie food. As for fast food? Forget it. Sure, some of the chains are grabbing onto some particular fad diet and claiming to make food that fits the niche, but Subway’s “low-carb” ranch dressing has 22 grams of fat in a serving, so that really doesn’t help me.

Why is it that there is so much money to be made in the diet industry and none of the actual food service industry? Is it because people are willing to read about diets but not actually change their eating habits? Is it because people are tempted by fad diets and not by real long-term changes, so any restaurant that wanted to be successful would have to offer food related to a new fad diet every month, rather than just offer quick, great-tasting, low-fat foods? Are these foods so hard to produce?

I don’t know. All I know is that while eating healthfully is simple, it is also very hard. It requires you to think about food nearly all of the time. You have to plan ahead. You cannot be caught hungry without an assortment of healthy choices. You cannot have a hectic, busy day without quickly heated, or possibly handheld options stashed somewhere. You can’t come home from work after a long day and have only ingredients which require three hours of preparation and cooking. It’s exhausting.

But I don’t want to just talk about food, I want to talk about me. And when I say “me”, I mean Kirstie Alley. Not her show exactly, but what seems to have been her honest obliviousness to her own weight problem. I read an interview a few months ago where she said that she wanted to do this “Fat Actress” show as an exaggeration — like sure, compared to all those waifs in Hollywood she’s overweight, but really she’s just normal-sized. And it was only when she saw herself in the show that she realized that she was much heavier than she had realized. She had absolutely no idea. Last week, I was reading the introduction to this cookbook I have, and the author was saying that sure, he knew he wasn’t skinny or anything, but he had no idea just how fat he was until he saw pictures of himself. And then he went to the doctor and found out that he weight 308 pounds.

This is one of the many problems with weight. You don’t go from 125 to 165 overnight. The weight creeps up slowly. You look the same from one day to another. Until one day, your clothes don’t fit. Or you look in the mirror naked and realize you look different. I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time admiring my naked self in the mirror. And by then, you’re facing a huge uphill battle.

Supersize Me was on the other day and I came in at the part where the doctors are telling him how much weight he gained over the 30 days and how much his cholesterol shot up. Why is it that you can gain so much weight by eating McDonald’s for 30 days, but you won’t lose the same amount by not eating McDonald’s for 30 days? Or even by eating only the healthiest diet imaginable for that period?

Weight management is this mystical magical thing with secret combinations and hidden answers. Eat early in the morning. Don’t eat late at night. Have a carbohydrate only with a protein. Eat fruit only by itself. Eat bananas and milk for seven days. Don’t eat any bananas, unless you are also eating tomatoes. This just can’t be right.

I never learned about what I should eat when I was growing up. It seems so obvious. How can I say I didn’t learn it? But I had no idea. The only vegetables I knew existed were from a can. Have you ever eaten canned brussels sprouts? They make you question your belief in God. Would a loving, caring God create such a thing and require us to eat it to remain healthy? No. No, I don’t think so.

It’s not just that I didn’t learn how to make healthy choices, it’s also that I never felt the need to. When you’re young, you don’t think about things like cardiovascular health and long-term stamina. You think about how you look. I was pretty skinny. (Well, I thought I was pretty skinny. I am just under 5′ 4″ and weighed about 115, maybe 120 pounds all through high school and college. However, I was watching the episode of America’s Next Top Model last night where they weigh all the girls, and many of them were 5′ 10″ and 114 pounds, so maybe I wasn’t skinny after all. P. last night: “You’re not allowed to watch this show anymore.”)

I ate fast food every day. I had no concept of healthful food.

But metabolism can be cruel. It can trick you, lull you into a false sense of security. Forsake you with no warning. I noticed my weight creeping up as I said goodbye to my twenties forever. But I was busy. We’re all busy. I had too many things on my mind to find room for something as trivial as gaining a few pounds. And it was always a few pounds. You don’t gain 10 pounds overnight. You might notice you’ve gained two pounds, but you’re trying to pay the mortgage and keep your job and save your marriage. The last thing you’re worried about is two pounds. Even when those two pounds creep up every month.

So, one day, I woke up and realized that I had gained about 30 pounds. Wait. How did this happen? Where did this come from? I vowed to lose weight. I meant it. I cannot tell you how much I meant it. How much I wanted it. I barely recognized myself. I realized how quickly I tired out when I went hiking or kayaking or anything at all that required stamina and endurance. So, over the course of the next year, I started working out. I researched diets and nutrition and went to a nutritionist and read the South Beach Diet and joined Weight Watchers and joined a pool at work where we all weighed in every week and put our weights into a spreadsheet and paid money if we gained. I gained an additional 10 pounds.

I had no idea how to lose weight. And what I learned from this failed experiment is that no one miracle diet exists because every single person is different. And while there may be some ideal for healthful eating, you have to find something that you can actually live with forever. And that’s different for everyone.

Originally, I made the mistake of wanting to know everything. I wanted to know exactly what foods were best, when I should eat them, how the diet thing worked exactly. I compared nutritional content of vegetables. I wanted to optimize my eating experiences. It exhausted me so much, I gave up entirely. And all those stops and starts only bumped up my weight. I have realized that I need to do this thing gradually. Start small. Don’t worry about eating the very best vegetable. Start by eating any vegetable at all.

I’ve experimented (obviously with a lot of failures before any successes) and am starting to figure out what works for me and what I can’t commit to long term. Because the other thing I learned is that I can’t think of this as a diet. It has to be the way I eat. Always. So, if it’s so hard I can’t stand it for a week, there’s no way I’ll be able to stick with it my entire life.

Fat-free milk? Good. Low-fat soy milk? OK, but only vanilla, and only in my coffee. Low-fat cheddar. As good as the original! But it’s a slow process.

I love to cook. I like learning about how to make the dishes I cook taste as great as possible. I like combining ingredients and flavors. I love discoving new wines. The idea that I would have to give up two of my favorite pastimes was unpalatable to me. So, I instead decided to use my knowledge of ingredients and food and put it to use making low-calorie, low-fat foods. I found that drinking two glasses of wine with dinner five nights a week is 17.5 Weight Watchers points, but one glass of wine three nights a week is only 6 points. I started figuring out balance.

I’ve lost 15 pounds so far. I’m finally below where I was when I started dieting. And I am finally to the point where I feel like this is how I eat, and not that I’m on a diet. And I’m losing weight even though I had avocado eggrolls Saturday night and the absolute best cheese ravioli in butter cream sauce the week before.

P. will be happy when I’m back to a weight that feels comfortable to me. I’m sure he’s tired of hearing every day, “I only lost a half pound in two weeks! Why??” And, “how fat do I look, really?” And I’m hoping that the longer I do this, the more the habits will be ingrained in me so I don’t feel like I’m thinking about my weight all the time.

Today for lunch, I popped out to the grocery store deli and got a baked potato with BBQ chicken. And drove right past the siren called the McDonald’s drive-through. Hey, it’s progress. Little by little, I’m getting there.

Do you ever bore yourself? Not that I am implying that you are in any way boring, because you absolutely are not. You are entertaining and insightful and witty and fun to be around. I’m talking mostly about myself. Sometimes, I just bore myself to tears. I just noticed that I have twelve unfinished journal entries sitting around on this site. “Your Drafts”, WordPress so helpfully tells me, and lists them in mostly chronological order. Only I’m too bored to finish any of them.

I’m thinking of posting them all in their varying degrees of unfinished states. You can complete the sentences, fill in the blanks, write the endings. It could be like choose your own adventure with unlimited possibilities.

Why do I have so many cookbooks? Maybe it’s because I have dreams about my past life surviving the potato famine. And all that kept me alive was my stockpile of cookbooks that explained how to make foods that amazingly, did not have potatoes in them. Or maybe I befriended a crazy cookbook lady as a kid and she bequeathed her collection to me when she died, with strict instructions to preserve them forever.

It’s entirely up to you!

And why do I hang my clothes in specific color order in my closet and yet am wholly unable to sort my towering pile of mail? Well, that one’s easy. It’s because I’m a loon. But with an entry that ends mid-sentence, you’re free to come up with something that makes me sound much saner!

It can be difficult for me to finish things. I’ve got that perfectionism streak, you know. So, I’m always torn between impatience and fear of failure. I can’t wait to be done with something, while at the same time know that if I’m still working on it, I have a chance to improve it. I can’t seem to find the answer to that ever-burning question: what is good enough?

Please explain to me why people feel the need to play the devil’s advocate? As in, you are discussing some issue and the person with whom you are discussing says, “well, if I can just play devil’s advocate for a minute…” And then goes on about hypothetical objections to your ideas for which he cannot argue convincingly, nor can he be asked to, because he wasn’t advancing the objections, he was merely “playing devil’s advocate”.

Dude. If you have objections to the ideas, say you have objections. And then stand behind them and provide some arguments for them. Don’t hide behind the devil. And if you don’t have objections personally, then why the hell are you making up hypothetical issues that may not exist? Do you have some childhood trauma that makes it impossible for you to simply agree with someone? Either you agree or you don’t or possibly you’re not sure if you agree without more data. But what the hell does the devil have to do with anything? No pun intended. Although you can join him there if you really want to continue being his advocate.

There. I feel better now.

I am really tired of thinking about and talking about my damn strengths and weaknesses as an employee and figuring out balance between work and home and wondering if I’m doing too little or too much or if I’m adding value to the workplace and why I care if I’m adding value or why I assess my own value only in terms of what I am doing in the workplace and all that crap that you think about when you’re me and make it all some big deal.

We recently went through our annual review period at work and I let all that caring too damn much show and now I have people caring about my well-being in the workplace or whatever which is great and I don’t mean to sound cavalier or ungrateful but I’ve been going around and around with all this in my head for about a month now and I don’t want to hear another word about the areas in which I excel and the areas that could use additional attention. The way our organization is set up, I can’t just have this discussion with one person, but rather with four different people, each with their own set of priorities and perspectives and ways of doing things.

What I really want is to find a way to be completely emotionally unattached to work, to do a good job and enjoy the work, but not get so emotionally invested in the every day ups and downs, and then to go home and leave work at work, and have a great life away from work.

But for now, I get frustrated and sometimes I cry, and lose all sense of self-worth when things aren’t going as well as I’d like and it’s a big mess. I’m really tired of thinking about it.

But there’s one thing I have been thinking about. The overall message I’ve gotten is that I’m super! I mean, not stellar or anything, but pretty good! Keep that up! Just what you’re doing! No, really!

The one thing I can do better is “communicate the obvious”. What the fuck does that mean, right? The way I ordinarily communicate is this: say I’m at a meeting, and during the course of that meeting, we all find out that something has changed for a project, like maybe the scope or the schedule and say it affects me, so I say, during the meeting, OK, so I’ll [insert consequence here, for instance, make those changes/adjust my schedule/etc.]. And then the meeting’s over and I do it.

Only with this communicate the obvious thing, what I should do is exactly what I do, but then, at the end of the meeting, provide a little recap, along the lines of “to sum up, here’s what I said I would do, and as you recall from the discussion we all had ten minutes ago, here’s why! And so that’s what I’m going to do, because I said it. Just now. And I’m saying it again.” And then, after the meeting, I should send out an e-mail to everyone at the meeting, saying what I just said.

Note that I’m not the faciliator at the meeting or the project lead or anything. Just keeping everyone informed about what I’m doing!

I’m really, really against this form of communication. But at first, I could not figure out why. Why was I so against extra-informing people? It’s better than under-informing them, right? But it just bothered me so much and I didn’t think I could bring myself to do it.

And then, I realized why. I realized it when someone communicated with me this exact way. And I wanted to smack them over the head and yell, “I am not a complete idiot! I heard you the first time. I was able to follow the conversation we just had. You may find this astounding but I do not need you to recount to me what I agreed to only three minutes ago. Nor do I need e-mail confirmation of same. I am actually bright enough to retain this information and use it properly. Dumbass.”

I do not want to be that person who communicates the obvious because it assumes that those around me can’t pick up on the obvious themselves. And I assume that they can. They’re adults! And are able to hold down full-time jobs! As engineers!

But becoming the annoying person who operates under the assumption that everyone else is unable to follow along without repeated summaries and reminders is apparently my action item for the year. It is my new area of growth: to stop communicating with others as though they were smart enough to understand me the first time.

I’m understandably excited.

So, to sum up, I’ve just written a journal entry in which I rambled on incoherently. I expressed frustration with the suggestion that I change a communication dynamic that’s been working well for me so far. I’ve indicated that I find those who communicate in the manner I’ve been asked to be fucking irritating as hell. And I’ve said that I can’t wait to start. But really that was just an attempt to find something funny in a frustrating situation. AKA: a lie.

frozen fingers, nose
warmth outside, not meant for me
damn cold apartment

time drags, manic thoughts
could have, should have, didn’t, so.
need patience for peace

the joy of newness
it was always there, waiting
couscous is so good!

which one? jeans that fit
or crispy cheesy french fries?
why can’t I have both?

stop the reloading
my answers will come in time
I want to know now

coffee. warm goodness
soothes my worried soul; also
stops pesky headaches

words. all jumbled here
pieces seem easier than
whole thoughts, for today

This morning, I was sneaking home, as wanton single women tend to do, and my hair was all frazzled and wild, and I’m sure mascara was everywhere. And the best of it was that I was wearing jeans with black boots last night, but this morning I was wearing sweats (cropped sweats even, which just makes the outfit so much hipper), but I still only had my boots for footwear. So, if you can imagine, ankle-high boots and sweats that ended mid-calf. I was a hottie, I’m telling you. And P. kissed me as I left and told me I looked very fashionable. I felt so pretty.

So, I was really hoping that no one would actually see me as I walked to my car. My exact thoughts were along the lines of “no one see me, no one see me, no one…” You get the idea.

Of course, as I walked out towards the parking lot, I saw a woman walking ahead of me with her dog. And then she turned and saw me. And then she stopped. And walked towards me. And came up really close. Which is when I remembered I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet, but what can you do.

She pointed to my car and asked if it was mine. I expected her to have some issue with it. Why I assume the worst in people, I have no idea. I was ready to defend where I parked, defend the offensive purple color, something. I was just looking for something different and fun when I picked the color! I was tired of black cars. How was I to know that you get tired of purple I whole lot quicker than black? And then she said, “you know, there are three unassigned spaces in the garage. They are trying to sell them, but until they do, no one’s using them.”

And she said that she had started parking in one and she would leave a note on my car to tell me what spaces the others were. Because it sucks to scrape ice off your windows or hunt for a space at night.

Wow. That was really nice that she thought of me. Also makes me feel a little dorky that I’ve been out there scraping my windows in cropped sweats and knee-high boots often enough that someone has noticed me. But it would never cross my mind to do offer that up like she did. If I learned about empty spaces, I’d just park there. It wouldn’t even occur to me to tell someone who I often saw with the same parking dilemma as I had. I also don’t pay attention to the world around me enough to have any idea who might have the same parking dilemma I had, actually. She told me what her car was, I guess assuming I would have noticed her as much as she noticed me. Blue Outback? No idea. Never seen it before. I’m so oblivious.

When most of your interaction with people is when they cut you off on the freeway, it’s easy to forget that sometimes, people are nice. And when people look at me, it’s easy to remember that sometimes, people have no fashion sense.

Here’s the truth. I want to be perfect. And I want everyone to like me and to see that I’m perfect. Deep down I know I can’t be truly perfect, but I can try, right? And trying takes working really hard, ignoring your own feelings, catering to the desires of others, and not having a life of your own. You still don’t get to perfect, but you can get pretty close sometimes and people tell you how wonderful you are and how much you’ve helped them and you vital you are to the whole damn world. It feels great! And you’re tired and overwhelmed and carrying the responsibilities of everybody and not doing anything for yourself and you don’t even know who you are anymore or what you want, but people like you!

It took me a long time, but I realized that wasn’t exactly healthy and started working really hard at balance and doing things for me and being OK with less than perfect. I thought it was working out OK. But now I’m realizing that I got a lot of my self-worth and self-confidence and self-liking from being vital to the whole damn world. And I’m realizing that I no longer am that vital superwoman who people count on for everything. And all of my self-confidence and self-worth have left me.

Today, I was talking to a manager at work and some of it was regular work career growth stuff and some of it was personal life experience stuff and we were talking about how people make choices for what’s best for their lives, and you can throw yourself into work 100 percent, or you can take a more balanced approach and also devote time to other things in life. And he was using terms like “brilliant” and “stellar”. And he wasn’t talking about me. I do a really good job. I’m great to work with. But I realized I’m no longer considered the brilliant and stellar one.

Well, of course I’m not. Academically, I knew that would happen. I knew that working 40 hours a week rather than 80 hours would have an impact. I knew that letting some things go and not stressing about everything little thing would make a difference in what I produce. I knew I would be going from “the best job ever” to “really good.” I knew that.

I started crying. I don’t know how to come to terms with this in practice. It’s hard for me to see anything other than “stellar” and “inadequate”. There is no in-between. I always had a lot of self-confidence because I knew I was doing the best job possible. No one else could do better. But I have no self-confidence now. This is the first year my annual review has said “meets expectations”. That’s it? I meet expectations?

Why is it so hard for me to accept being merely good? I don’t want to go back to sacrificing myself for work or anything else. I want to have a life. I want to have me. I should be able to take confidence in that. I now have more time to do the things I love: writing, cooking, reading, hiking, whatever. But my confidence in myself, it’s just not there. I don’t know how to get it. I just don’t know how.

Today I was catching up with someone I hadn’t talked to in a while. And she asked me how various things in my life were going. And after I had caught her up, she said, “you must be very happy! Everything is going so well!” And I said, yeah, I should be happier, huh. And she said I just need to figure out what makes me happy. Which is exactly what I’ve been thinking! What is that, dammit.

We talked about how you look towards the next big thing in your life. If you’re looking for a job, you think about how great it will be when you get it. And then when you get the job, you immediately get mired down into the day-to-day of it all, and you start thinking about how great it will be take take vacation. Or whatever.

I do that all the time. I rarely just stop and think about enjoying now. I’m always waiting for the next thing.

I was talking to someone else last week who just got a promotion. And he said that he’s been actively working at getting it for two years now. And it hasn’t been easy. And then once he got it, he was happy about it for maybe a day and then everything went right back to exactly how it was before.

Enjoying now takes patience, which I just really don’t have. Although I don’t know what I think all this rushing around is going to do for me. I think maybe I’m not as happy as I could be because I’m always so impatient, so anxious about the next thing, so stressed about what I’m going to be doing. I don’t focus on what I’m actually doing now. And I end up feeling pulled at both ends. But it’s no one’s fault my own.

Can I slow down and stop worrying so much about what comes next? Can I let go a little and accept that life is filled with unknowns and it’s OK not to know everything little thing? Can I stop eating so many potatoes? OK, that last one might be going just a little overboard. There’s no need to go all crazy.