I have a great life. A great life.
And yet most of my time right now is spent being afraid. And hiding from that fear.
It’s embarrassing really. The things that I let myself care about, the things I pin my hopes on, they’re trivial in the grand scheme of things. And I try not to talk about them for fear of exposing my foolishness.
And even more than not wanting to look silly, I’m afraid that if I turn around and look at it, if I face it head on, it will leap from the murkiness of my imagination and become more powerful in the technicolor of reality. Like an old comic book movie when the villain morphs from penciled drawings to flesh and bone threat, from fear to danger.
But not talking about it hasn’t stifled the fear. It’s only made the cloud that follows me more ominous because it stalks without a name or witness.
I’m afraid of failing.
And how cliche is that? How mundane and trite, when said aloud, is the fear of failure? And it’s especially uninteresting when muttered by someone who already has so much.
Those who are happy cannot possibly understand real fear.
Those who have known success cannot pretend to run from failure.
And I have a great life. A great life.
And yet, amidst the love and the adventure and the stability and the joy, in the middle of it all is still the fear. And the doubt. And the guilt.
I’ve spent twenty minutes trying to verbalize on this page what the dream is. What it is I’m working for. What it is exactly that I want to succeed so badly. And I’m struggling with the words because maybe they’re too scattered and maybe they’re just dumb. And maybe looking at them in black and white will bring those doubts to light and I won’t be able to handle the results – whatever the hell that means.
I want my shopping blog for women to make money. Real money. Enough money that it justifies the time I’m pouring into it. Enough money that we can pack up, some day, and move to the city that makes my heart sing. Enough money that my family can finally benefit from all the fucking time I’ve spent on the Internet over the last four years.
But it’s more than that. It’s not just that one site I’m pinning my hopes on. If it were, it would almost make sense. If it were just that one thing, I could identify the dream more clearly maybe.
But it’s the writing too.
I want to make a living writing.
That’s what it is. I think.
I want to earn a living that is portable and mobile and dependant on the words I tap out onto this wheezing laptop. I want to see more than $35 here and $80 there trickle in every month.
And I’ve started. I’ve been writing at UpTake about vacations and at Work It, Mom! and oh my God someone is paying me to write. And for a while just that was enough to make my head spin.
But then it was no longer enough to make a couple hundred dollars a month. Because, truth be told, I’m robbing my family of time every single day for that couple hundred dollars a month and it has to be more than that.
But what if it’s not? What if I’m wasting my time? What if Buy-Her never gets more than 50 of my friends checking it out every day as a sign of friendship and support? What if it’s crap? What if I push and push for six months and see nothing? What if I made promises to my family and told Jared it would be worth it and it isn’t?
What if I’m always just one of those people who wants to write and never does shit with it? What if the reality is always that if you break down the time and the energy and the dollars and cents, what if it’s always a $6/hour joke of a gig? What if it’s always something that sounds a hell of a lot cooler than it is in reality?
What if the coffee shop office never comes? What if the tiny apartment in a great location that needs a ridiculous amount of work never exists? What if I’m always one of those people chasing after the next best thing and at the end of my life it’s just a series of half assed attempts and nothing great?
What if I’m always just another cliche?
What if it is stupid and trite and unrealistic and naive?
What if this thing I want so badly never makes sense in black and white? What if it’s always vague and ambiguous and just out of reach and too shameful to talk about out loud?
What if I get as close to that dream as I realistically can and realize that Carrie Fucking Bradshaw is a fictional character, you idiot! And who the fuck do you think you are that you deserve this fantasy life that’s wrapped around living your passion and making it work instead of putting in the hours just like normal people every goddamn day? Who do you think you are? What makes you so special? What makes you different than anyone else who has to punch a time card and go to soccer games and do the laundry and the dishes and just get by? Who do you think you are?!?
You have a great life. A great life.
And those people who make that life worth living? Jared and Devin and Emma – they deserve more than to be tied to a flaky dream chaser. They deserve more than to be drowned by your foolish ambition. They deserve to be your passion. They deserve stability from you. They deserve more than to be supporting characters in your narcisstic fantasies.
Who the fuck do you think are?
Jared didn’t sign up for any of this, you know. He just wants a good life – a normal life. A house and a job and kids and maybe a vacation once in a while. A boat and a motorcycle in a quiet suburban neighborhood. A beer at the end of the day. He doesn’t need to be holding you up while you chase one dream after the next. Don’t you think he’ll get tired of this some day? Don’t you think he rolls his eyes and bites his tongue and wonders why in the hell he didn’t just marry some nice, quiet girl with a college degree and a normal dream? Do you think he doesn’t remember the last time you promised that this would pay off? That that dream would be worth it?
Don’t you know how exhausting it must be to be married to you?
Those kids deserve more from you. They deserve a mom who drives a mini van and totes them around from one activity to th next and spends hours doing their homework with them. They deserve a mother who isn’t neurotic and constantly obsessed with all the little melodramas playing out inside her own head.
Don’t you know what they’ll say about you when they’re grown?
Your dreams are stupid and impractical. You can tell because of their constant shape shifting. You can tell by how hard it is for you to say them out loud. You can tell by how much everyone else around you has to sacrfice in order for them to come true. You can tell by how foolish you look, sitting on your patio surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and empty water bottles, with your hair a mess and your face unwashed, desperately trying to breathe life into it.
Look at yourself.
It kills you, doesn’t it? Your hands are shaking and your face is tear stained as you flesh out the reality, as you draw the picture of who you are and what you’ve become and what in God’s name you’re trying to do.
And that’s what you’re afraid of.
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Miss Britt Reply:
April 6th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
@Michelle, I do believe that, too. I believe that the best way to teach your kids is to be who you want them to be.
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