Struggling to Build My Dream Life

It feels like everything is going wrong.

Schools nowadays teach kids about Growth Mindset.

In a nutshell, it’s a “look at the bright side…” mentality. You didn’t get a good grade? Look on the bright side, that test could have been harder and now you know to study in advance. Did you lose your cell phone? Look on the bright side, your pictures are saved to the cloud and those are irreplaceable.

It’s taken me a few years, but I try to use it as a way to not live a life of misery. Like my mom.

My mother is the most miserable person on earth. Everything is a criticism. “Someone was breastfeeding in the airport and everyone was staring!” she once said. When I told her that I guarantee not a single person was staring, she huffed and that it was still awful to do in public.

When my brother and I (the latter a broke college kid) splurged and got professional pictures of us to give as a Mother’s Day gift, she immediately criticized me for not getting my hair done in a salon.

This weekend I tried, via Skype (yes…Skype) to help my parents with a banking website. I needed them to share their screen. It’s a button at the bottom and easy to find. It resulted in half an hour of my parents reaching mass-level pandemonium panic, yelling at each other, and reacting the way you would if two sworn enemies were trapped in a timed Saw escape room.

It took me a long time but thankfully, I don’t think or behave like she does anymore (even if my behavior was on a significantly less scale than hers). When my car was broken into and someone took the contents of my wallet, I told myself “Well, it was at most two hundred bucks and my cards can be canceled. At least they left my Kate Spade purse and my driver’s license.”

I’m trying to teach this to my kids as well. I want them to find the silver linings in every bad situation in hopes that it’ll build emotional resistance when they’re older.

My gorgeous quartz countertop got a chip out of it last week. My kitchen is less than two years old and it was part of my divorce madness. I white-knuckle my rage and tell myself, “It’s small and at a distance, it looks like a smudge. I could probably hire someone to fix it. It’s not even in an obvious spot. It’s fiiiiiiine.”

Despite all of this, the past two months have been garbage. So bad, that a close friend of mine send me a handwritten card telling me that I have had a lot of bad luck lately and hang in there. She listed some of the bad things I’m dealing with and my initial reaction was, “Damn…I had forgotten about those things. Now I’m super bummed out.”

Last night, someone hit my car after a date while I spent the drive home figuring out my exit strategy. I grit my teeth and told the police officer, “It could have been so much worse. It looks like it’s just cosmetic.”

In my driveway crying over the comparison of my date and the breakup of someone I loved, I dried my tears and looked for the silver linings.

When I divorced, my goals were to buy a house, go more than one week without my children crying over it, and fall in love again. I told myself that I achieved all three things. I should be happy, even if the last one didn’t pan out. Isn’t it better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all?

Fuck you Alfred Lord Tennyson.

I scroll through endless videos about the Laws of Attraction, manifesting, self-concept, and creating the life of dreams. I need to behave like a woman who has everything she wants. It’s not about who you become along the way. It’s embodying the person you want to become, today.

This morning, I cracked. This wasn’t crying over a breakup like I’ve been doing for weeks. I’m crying over everything.

Things aren’t getting easier. Things aren’t getting better. I feel like my spirit has broken repeatedly my whole life and each time, I tell myself that I’ve hit rock bottom. At this point, I’ve hit the center of the earth with how rock bottom I’ve gotten. It never feels like I’ll recover.

But I know the drill. I know to plaster a smile on my face because I have a meeting in thirteen minutes. I know to behave enthusiastically over work that I don’t give a shit about. I know to act interested in people’s small talk.

I know how to pretend that everything is fine when inside it feels like a ship in a storm of volcanic fiery lava while Wizard of Oz monkeys fly around, throwing spears at the boat.

When manifesting a dream life or creating a self-concept, you must imagine the person you want to become. The main character in a movie.

I’m scared because I can’t imagine that person. I can’t see her. I don’t know what a confident, healthy, cool, happy version of a person I want to be.

I paused this writing for an hour of meetings. My body was tingling and going number as my anxiety attack happened on Zoom. But I played the game and grinned through it.

My brain goes through movie characters who embody the imaginary person I want to become. Nothing Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, or Meryl Streep made makes me want to be their characters.

The question I need to plow through is: what do I want to achieve, today, to stop feeling this crummy?

First up, I’ve been ignoring my friends’ texts and messages. I need to jump on that because as much as I hate humans, I need connection.

Do I need to shower? I should, except I’m not going anywhere tonight so what’s the point? Crossing “hygiene upkeep” off the list of what I need to achieve today.

I just ate an apple. I eat one vegetable or fruit per week (no, really). So, that’s a thing. But I want to go to the store and buy chips to fuel me through the work I have to do tonight.

I’m tired. I want to nap. But if I do that, I’ll probably sleep for five hours. But I’m so wiped from crying and I feel like I need a reset.

A nap is all I can do right now.