I am standing at this crossroad. I struggle to obtain and maintain balance in my life. I know what is important to me and what I want to dedicate time to, however, somehow I don't get to do so. Before I know it, 24 hours have flown by and I am stuck in a state of replay.
I think it is safe to assume that we, as humans, want great things. We want a nice life with nice things. We want to own our own home, but not just any home, a beautiful, spacious and well adorned home. We want a nice car, one with leather interior, built in navigation and loaded to the brim. We want to wear pretty things and go to fancy places and say to our neighbor, "Oh we just got back from a cruise and now we are remodeling our kitchen and we are planning a trip to Europe in the fall".
Okay so maybe that is a little over the top, for some. But you get my point.
One moment I find myself content. Happy with the way things are. Not stressing about being compared to the Jones', not worrying if my shoes are in season or if I'm being looked upon with pity. I think to myself, "I have a wonderful life and I don't need anything else to be happy". Then the next moment I am consumed by this overwhelming sense of anxiety, this voice yelling inside of me saying "YOU NEED TO MOVE FASTER, DO MORE, GET MORE, BE MORE!". And it makes me want to vomit.
I have always struggled with this need to be better than I was yesterday, which I guess is normal. We all want to grow and become better people. For some reason though, my need seems excessive. That if I don't have this over the top luxurious life, I will be rejected, spat back out and isolated from all of humanity. I need to have an amazing career, a position that holds a place of high importance and therefore, comes with a nice bi-weekly paycheck. I need to own a luxury vehicle that people look at and go "Oh my gosh, do you see what she is driving?". I need to own a house, 3000sq ft, with a pool and granite counter tops and hardwoods throughout. For some strange reason I feel that if I don't deliver all of this to the world, I will be nothing.
But as I said, I stand at a crossroad. I'll be honest, of course I want to have nice things. Do I NEED them? No. I don't. And that is the honest truth. But I am not going to lie and claim that I don't want nice things. As I said, we all want nice things. But where I stand confused is the idea behind those concepts. The mentality of having a nice life vs having nice things. They do differ, you know.
I was raised by two people who did everything in the world to give my brother and I everything we wanted. They worked hard, struggled at times and never told us we couldn't play a sport, go to an event or start a hobby. It wasn't long before I started to understand the lengths my parents went to make sure we never felt like we were at the end of the pack. Maybe that is where I get this internal conflict. I always think to myself, if they could do it, I can do it, but do I want to put myself through all of that to give it? And the answer of course is 'no'. I mean, what person wants to struggle to provide a great life for their family. So, here we go, my heart begins to race and I think I have to GOGOGO and DODODO so we can have this wonderful amazing life where people look at us and think, "Man, they have done so well for themselves".
You see, I am both people. I am the person who is okay with the simple things and doesn't need grand things to be happy, but I also want to obtain nice things and have the ability to not carry the burden of making it day to day. I find myself in a constant state of anxiety. Needing to accomplish so much in such a little amount of time. Since the moment my feet hit pavement I have been going a million miles a minute. Graduating high school early. Moving away before I was 18. Falling in love. Getting heart broken. Falling in love again. Owning a home. Marriage. Career. I have always had this driving force inside of me yelling YOU ARE NOT GOING FAST ENOUGH and all I want to do is stop for 5 minutes and smell the flowers on the side of the road. My concern is, all these things, all these excessive wants, they tend to destroy people. Turn them into ugly beings. They become people that don't care about happiness in its most sincere form and they surely won't associate with people who don't have as much as they. I've witnessed it. Watched it happen. How do you prevent it? How do you ensure that these things don't take over your soul?
As I sit here, attempting to put together an entry that makes sense and my head is racing. I sit and think about all the things I want to do in my life. The person I want to be. I don't want to worry about tomorrow or stress about money, or withhold myself from doing the things that I want to do. I don't want to surround myself with people that can't love me despite the things I have or money in my bank account or anything of the like. Is it so bad to want both things? Is it so hard to attempt to find the balance between them?
So here we are, having a life but not really living at all. Ironic, right?
I had a goal at the beginning of the year. To be the person I wanted to be, not the person people expected me to be. I felt I had the perfect opportunity to finally achieve this goal. A fresh start in a new world. Well, I slacked and let that goal fall into the shadows. BUT here I am. Reminding myself why I made that goal in the first place and recommitting to it, right. this. second.
I am a dreamer. My husband scoffs at me often because I tend to dream like a 10 year old girl. But you know what, without dreams, our lives would be so dull. Why do we work so hard every single day if we aren't going to have dreams to drive us? I have faith that one day, I will obtain my dreams. I will have the life I want, the balance between a nice life and nice things without the fear of becoming ugly on the inside. We will do what we want, go where we want and live exactly how we want. I'm not sure how long or what it will take to get there, but we will. And I promise myself, I will enjoy the crazy ride all the way there.
