Sunday, April 28, 2013

Game On

Have you ever had the feeling that something - anything - in your life has got to change?  Not just a little thing, like hair color or new glasses, but something major.  Drastic.  What's the phrase?  Something's gotta give.  I've been having that feeling a lot lately.  Sort of this niggling little irritant in the back of my brain urging me to make a major change in my life, sell everything and move cross country, or some such insane idea.

The thing about me is that I don't generally do drastic.  I have a love/hate relationship with change.  On the one hand, I'm all for progress, moving forward, discovering the latest and greatest - and lord knows I have a definite instant gratification streak.  But on the other hand, I loathe the unexpected.  I'm a planner.  A control freak.  A turtle who likes to hide in her shell with detailed maps and itineraries, researching and planning every last little detail of everything until I've sucked every last morsel of joy and spontaneity out of whatever it is I'm obsessively researching.  The problem with that is that I never have enough data to make what I feel is an informed decision, and so one of two things happens.  1) I get so tired of the indecision that I make a choice - any choice, generally with utter disregard for all of my careful research and planning - just to be done with it.  Or 2) I become so overwhelmed by information and am so terrified of making the wrong decision that I end up making no decision at all.  The former is how I ended up with my first tattoo.  The latter is why, 8 years after graduating from college with a degree I no longer had any idea what to do with, I still hadn't figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

The choice I made back then - 8 years out of college, newly laid off, faced with a desperate search for a job in a career I despised with every fiber of my being - was the first drastically different, and I think the most genuinely *me*, thing in my life I'd ever done. At first glance, choosing massage therapy might not seem like such an odd thing, and to fully explain why would require a bunch of boring information that no one really cares about.  Suffice it to say that both of my parents have graduate degrees, and from the age of 8 I had declared - loudly and often - to anyone who would listen that I was going to be a doctor.  My decision not to attend medical school was bad enough.  Choosing something that was not academic, rational or cerebral?  Sacrilege.

One of my favorite quotes is from a Doctor Who episode:  "When you're a kid, they tell you it's all...grow up.  Get a job.  Get married.  Get a house.  Have a kid, and that's it.  But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that.  It's so much darker.  And so much madder.  And so much better."  And it is!  I've always lived on the weirder side of life, but - again - only with the smaller details.  The bigger things?  Normal, rational people just didn't live life that way.  They made safe choices.  Non-risky choices.  It took me 30 years to grasp the concept that making big decisions against the mold wasn't just something other people did.  It was something I could do, too.

My forward momentum on the 'be more me' front did continue past my initial decision to go to massage school.  After I'd been in school for a few months, my mom and I were talking about...well, I no longer remember what exactly, but it was probably something to do with holistic practices or organic foods or some such...and she made a comment to the effect that she wasn't surprised that I had gotten into these weirder things after starting massage school.  My response was that massage school hadn't caused the 'weirdness', it had just allowed me to be more comfortable expressing the side of myself I had always kept tucked away.  But those were baby steps.  Little things.  The drastic changes began and ended with that one brief burst of brilliance (no alliteration intended) three years ago.  So here I am, 32 years old, filled with the absolute certainty that I need to turn my life on its ear...with my feet firmly planted to the ground in terror.  Something's gotta change.  And this is my first step.

For as long as I can remember, I've had this image in my head of the person I want to be.  I was hit with the realization recently that I don't have to become that person, I already am her.  She's the real me that's been locked inside all the crap and conventionality and safe decisions that have been piled on year after year for over three decades.  All I've needed is a plan to get rid of all that flotsam and let her out.  So this is the story (all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down...true though that may be, now that I think about it, I digress) of how I plan to Make It So.

No comments:

Post a Comment