Happy F#@king Birthday to ME!

 

 

In honor of my birthday today, the 14^th of May, I have assembled my own personal top-10 list of some of the things I’ve learned at the ripe old age of none-of-your-beeswax.

 

10) If I COULDA done it differently, I WOULDA. I’ve stopped beating myself up with SHOULDA. I did the best I could with the information and skills I had at the time. This has come in extremely handy since I’ve done a bunch of incredibly stupid things in my life.

 

9) Don’t be a victim even if I’ve been victimized. Things work out much better if I take 100% responsibility for my life and for fixing whatever got broken. Even if I’m run over by a truck, I still have to be the one to go to PT, not the SOB who hit me.

 

8) A client once asked me when she was going to get her period of “nice”, meaning a time when all kinds of annoying shit would stop happening~~like having her basement flood or having an asshole boss. “When you’re dead,” I told her.

 

7) Being special sucks. Being special means you have to keep being special. It means you are under a microscope. It means that you live in dread of the day you are no longer special. Don’t be special.

 

6) The way for me to enjoy pictures of myself is by waiting several years, preferably several decades, after the pictures are taken to actually look at them.

 

5) There is no endpoint to grief or getting in shape. You just get stronger, more flexible and more resilient so that the heavy lifting gets easier.

 

4) Purpose is never given to you like a birthmark~~you have to go out and get it, like a tattoo.

 

3) For Christ’s sake, you CANNOT CHANGE ANYONE. You can influence them, but you cannot change them. My journey is mine and their journey is theirs. Should they just want to keep cruising along on the Asshole Highway, they are perfectly entitled to do so.

 

2) Things happen for a reason, but not for the reason you think. People die because they’re sick, get speeding tickets because they’re speeding and win the lottery because they’re lucky motherfuckers.  You can create meaning from events, but it is not ordained.

 

1) If I want to have good self-esteem, I need to do things that are esteem-able. It’s pretty simple.

 

 

And in closing, as Emily asked in “Our Town”, do we ever completely know and appreciate what we have while on earth? Fuck no. Cognitive dissonance saves us from being aware 24/7 that we are going to die and therefore should probably be living life far more consciously and productively. Jesus, we’d all be mainlining Xanax if we had to do that. Just like when we’re procrastinating on studying or cleaning or paperwork, we often wait until the eleventh hour before we frantically cram it all in….. as the big clock runs down, I feel a great wish to cram every last bit of joy, fun, and peace I can into the life I have left.

 

And if I coulda done it sooner, I woulda. No more shoulding on myself.