My Fabulous Life!

I'm sorry. I couldn't resist. I can just imagine people reading that and going, "Huh? What the--what did she just say yesterday? Oh, good lord, where is that post? That woman has done lost her mind. . . ."

This makes me sit here and giggle happily to myself. I'm pretty pathetic that way, I'm afraid.

But! At some point--and I can't remember when because I've Been Sick, whimper, whimper--Zom asked me what I love about my life. At least that's what I *think* she asked me, because you know what? I've discovered as my life has changed and I try to whip through all the things I need to do, I don't read things as carefully as I used to. Or as I think I used to. Maybe it's about email. I don't know:  I'll quickquick read an email and respond to it lickety-split, and then, sometime later, get a reply going, "Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about." And I'll heave the big sigh, thinking, "Gee, what am I writing here, Urdu?" and I'll sigh again (I'm serious, y'all: I am HUGE with the sighing. It's an art, and I've mastered it. Alas. I hate listening to sighing people. And I am now The Queen of The Sighing and often want to just smack myself) and go look at their message again, and instead of it saying, "What do you love about your life?" which is what I thought it said, it actually says, "What did you love about Life?" meaning the magazine, or "Who was the love of your life?" or "What do you love about leaves?" or "Do you like Captain Crunch with or without milk?" because, really, by this point? I have no idea what relationship my perceptions have with reality. Slim and none, as my mother would say. Or was that what my dad said? Who knows?

Anyway. (And let me just thank you all again for sticking with me through these rambling asides. I appreciate it. They're entertaining for me, in large part because that's the way I think, and it would be the way I talk except that if you talk to other people with lengthy asides and commentary, you won't be talking to other people for long, no, baby. They will look at their watch and remember they've got a root canal scheduled in 5 minutes.)

What do I love about my life? Why do I think my life is fabulous? Is it because I've fulfilled all my parents' hopes and expectations for me? Because I've become wealthy and a respected member of the community? Because I've achieved greatness and renown? Produced a fine family?

Nope. None of those things. My life choices were pretty much a huge disappointment to everyone but me. And The EGE, who was, without a doubt, the best choice I ever made.

OK, then, what about what we talked about yesterday? Do I have supportive group of lifelong friends? Fabulous parties? Do I go on amazing photo adventures? Is my house decorated inspiringly in shabby chic (substitute here whatever is the current hot decorating trend, please, because I have no clue. Our house is decorated in the style of Lots of Color with Accents of Cat Fur)? Am I up on the latest food/fashion/movies/tv shows/must-read magazines/trending topics/news headlines? Have I ever been Abroad?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no.

I've written before about how my life isn't what people might imagine, probably many times. You're probably sick until death of reading about it. I apologize, but I have a point. Eventually, I do.

I live in the middle of nowhere, in West Texas, which is suffering through the longest drought in recorded history (I think that's what they're saying). It's hot (over a week of over 100 degrees) and dry (water restrictions, so we're very dangerously close to running out of water) and very, very ugly: almost everyone's let their grass die to patches of sharp brown stubble. Even the weeds are dead. So there are no day trips to parks or streams, lakes (our closest ones are at minimum capacity, those that haven't dried up already) or rivers. That makes me snicker (sadly, mockingly) just thinking of it: a day trip to a place where things are watery and green.

I don't have friends. That sounds harsh and self-pitying, but it's not. I have friends who live in other places, and we email back and forth now and then. But there's no one locally whom I visit or meet for coffee every week or invite over for dinner. There's no one I've known for years, or from high school. We don't have dinner parties or go to anyone's house. I haven't talked on the phone outside of work for months.

I don't have kids or grandkids, siblings or parents. I haven't seen or heard from any of my parents' family in years. There are no family reunions, no Christmas newsletters. Truthfully, I don't know who's alive and who's not. I can't remember all of my cousins because most of them I haven't seen in over 35 years.

There are days--many days; most days--when I don't leave the house and don't talk to anyone except The EGE. Many, many days. When I'm not sick (whimper, whine), I try to go to Starbucks in the afternoon just so I won't become a hermit like my mother. Since The EGE does all the shopping (to spare us the rants that ensue when I have to go to The Dreaded Wal-Mart, and also because he likes to shop for groceries), I could easily stay in the house for days at a time if I didn't get out and walk.

Money? I'll never be rich. For almost all of my working life, I've made below the official poverty level income. I have no 401K. I'm not going to spend My Retirement Years lying on a beach somewhere. Mainly because I don't want to ever retire: lying on a beach is not my idea of fun; it's my idea of torture. People seem to believe that having a job you love means you're making lots of money at it and will someday give it up and enjoy The Fruits of Your Labors. I don't believe that. I think having a job that you love means you want to do it for as long as you can--because you *love* it--and are grateful if you can afford to do that. I've known way too many people who had jobs they hated but couldn't leave, either because they wouldn't be able to find another one or because they were hooked on the perks, never mind that it made them miserable and was ruining the rest of their lives.

So maybe you're reading this and thinking, "Holy crap, there's not a lot to love. Poor Ricë." Which brings me to my point: I do, indeed, have A Fabulous Life, and I love almost everything about it. Oh, I'm not in joyous rhapsody every day, and there are plenty of days I can find a lot to gripe about. (And aren't you surprised?) I worry about what my old age will be like, and I often wish I could meet a group of creative people in the afternoons for coffee and Show-&-Tell (trust me: I've tried many times to form such a group, with very little success). I sometimes think about the other places we could live, places where everyone wasn't wondering what will happen on the day we finally run out of water completely and can't flush the toilets and where we could go out somewhere and walk through a woods or a forest or beside a bubbling stream. Or, gee, you know: places that didn't regularly make the list of most conservative and most religious small cities in the US. What a concept. I worry a lot, about a lot of things (although not nearly as much as I did when I was younger, thankyoujesus).

The reasons I love my life are many, and they're as idiosyncratic as yours. Here are some biggies:

~~I get to do what I want to do every day. While I'll never get rich at this and haven't had a raise in decades, I do get paid for doing what I love, and that's a very, very amazing thing. Getting paid to do what you love most to do is right up there under being loved by the people you love, which is also huge.

~~I don't have to deal with other people while I'm working. This is something that can't be overestimated if you've ever worked in an environment where maybe everyone but you was, oh, stoned every day, for example. Or crazy-bitchy from huge doses of hormones (there was a long explanation for how come, but, looking back on it, I'm pretty sure it was pre-op sex reassignment hormone injections). Turning tricks at work. You get the idea. After four years at the Department of Animal Control and dealing daily with the cast of characters employed there, I'm grateful every morning that I don't have to listen to X retch in the bathroom after shooting up and that the odor of weed doesn't waft across my desk and that no one has tried to euthanize themselves out back. It's a fabulous thing. In fact, I think everyone should have really skanky jobs in their 20s because it will make you soooooo appreciative of whatever kind of "normal" job you have later. I may not have a retirement plan, but nobody's laying out lines in my desk blotter before I clock in, either.

~~I firmly believe I'm making a difference in the world, and I know exactly what my purpose in life is. Oh, sure, the larger purpose is to be happy and be good to the beings who live with me, to be as good a person as I can. All that, sure. But the outside purpose, the thing I'm supposed to do in life, is clear: my job is to spread inspiration and help other people discover their own creative lives. Very simple. And very tough: tough enough to keep me busy until I die.

~~I love that I work from home, that I can get up at any time and go find a cat to pet, that The EGE can make a Starbucks run and I can take a break. I love that I can work early in the morning and late at night, whenever I want, without someone looking over my shoulder (and making sure I'm wearing a bra to the office (yeah, we had one of those guys, too)).

~~I love that I don't have to work away from home. After four years of commuting to Lubbock, to my mother's house, to finish school and teach there, I love every Monday morning when I don't have to get up at 4:30 a.m. and pack up all my stuff and leave for the week.

~~I live with beings I love. I love my husband, and I love the cats. There's no misery or continual friction in our relationships, so home is a happy place. I say that, and people think we're one of those couples that smile into each other's eyes all the time and claim they've never had an argument, ever. Oh, please. Those people make me want to stab them with a fork.

Take a look at what I've mentioned. In reading it over, I realize that the life I have is fabulous because I figured out ways to change the things I didn't like in the past. I really do believe that having crappy jobs and bad relationships and mistakes and crummy apartments early on is invaluable. If you're Paris Hilton, nothing is ever going to be fabulous because everything has always been fabulous. But to me, everything that's better than it used to be is just amazing. Because we didn't have central heat or air conditioning (this is an old house that had wall furnaces and no thermostat and rooms that were never warm enough), I'm happy every day that I can slide a switch and have cool air. Because my parents' marriage was not happy, I learned from them and am happy every day that i don't live in the house with someone who makes me miserable. I had really sucky jobs in my 20s, and I learned from those and am thrilled to death at not having to battle every single day to keep people from smoking in the room where I work.

I never had goals when I was young, not when it came to what I was going to be when I grew up. Oh, I thought I wanted to maybe be a college professor, but that was so I could smoke a pipe (my dad had some that were way, way cool) and wear a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Or grow up and be the guy who rode on the running board of the presidential limousine (Kennedy was shot when I was 7). Yes, apparently I believed that when I grew up, I would be a man. I have no idea why except hope. I must have hoped it would be so because I didn't know any women who did interesting stuff. They cooked, they cleaned house, they ironed, they took care of everyone else. Admirable jobs, absolutely, but none that held any appeal for me.

So, after crappy jobs and some degrees and some years when I cobbled together a living from five or six part-time gigs, I figured out what I was supposed to do with my life and then set about figuring out how to make that work.

Have I been lucky? Of course I have. Have I worked hard? You betcha. But the main thing, the thing I want people to know: you can craft the kind of life you want if you make  deliberate choices designed to get you there. There are many things I could have done differently that would have taken me to a different place. Having kids would have changed everything. Marrying someone less supportive would have been life-changing. I could have decided to give other things priority: community involvement, a social life, continuing education (for a while after I finished my masters I really thought I was going for the PhD and a teaching position).

Perhaps none of this is true, by the way: perhaps it's not that I shaped my life as much as my life shaped me. If I'd made some other choices decades ago, I might have found I had another life purpose and might be doing something completely different. It might all be fate, or it might all be cause and effect. That's way, way too much trouble to try to unravel, though, so I'm going to continue on with my own explanation, OK?

The key to having your own fabulous life is to figure out what you value, what your purpose is, and what you need to have those. Then you figure out what's in your way--what's holding you back. And you figure out what changes you need to make. Then you map out a plan to make those changes.

And that's where most people fail, because that's when they give up. Put it off. You want to cut back your hours at work but aren't ready to give up dinners out and a new car every three years. You want to get up an hour earlier so you can paint before you leave for work, but you really like watching late-night tv and aren't ready to give that up. You don't want to sign up for the continuing education course in composition or welding or watercolor because you've been out of school too long, everyone else will be smarter, it would take up all your free time. There's always a reason. But here's the deal: if you can see, glimmering in the distance, coming to you out of the fog, a life that you love, that's half the battle. So many people have no idea what they'd like their lives to be like because they never think past the standard goals of making more money and buying more stuff. For many, it isn't until retirement that they begin to think of what they'd love to do, and by then, they may be too tired or too much in debt to go for it. Don't be one of them. Maybe your life is pretty fabulous already--I think if you read about my life and see how "fabulous" really does mean completely different things for different people, you can see that fabulousness doesn't mean you have to ditch the life you've got and start over. Maybe you just need some minor tweaking. Or maybe you need an overhaul.

The place to start, though, is with this: what is your purpose in life? Not your goal--goals can change. But once you know your purpose, what you're supposed to do, what fulfills you and makes your stay on the planet worthwhile, everything else will begin to make sense. I'm not one of those people who's going to tell you that if you follow your bliss, the money will come naturally. People love to say that, but I think most of us recognize that as a fantasy. If that were true, more of us would be doing OK, if not being wildly wealthy. So, no:  just because you figure out what you're supposed to be doing doesn't mean you're going to reap financial rewards. It does mean, though, that things will begin to make sense. You'll begin to understand why you do what you do, why some things fascinate you and others bore you, where to put more energy and where to back off.

And it doesn't have to be some huge, world-changing purpose, either. Your purpose might be to turn an acre of ugly nothingness into an organic garden, or to preserve a family history that would be lost without your effort. It might be to mentor people just entering your field, or it might be to sing in public even if you don't get paid because your lovely voice makes people happy. It might be to bake cookies every week for the Pink Ladies at the hospital or to take kindergartners to the museum. It could be anything, but whatever it is, when you find it, it feels right. Not "right" in the sense of making people proud of you or "right" in the sense of is-going-to-make-you-rich, or "right" in the sense of so easy it requires no effort. I mean "right" in the sense that, when you think about it, it's as if you were born knowing it but had somehow forgotten it. As if you had the Official Document but had misplaced it for a while. It's something that fascinates and compels you and--this is important--makes you feel as if what you're doing is worthwhile. Maybe you want to go read about Right Livelihood if you get a chance. Here's one explanation, and here's something interesting.

I think I'm done. I should have some pithy summation or encouraging spur to action, but I don't. I've been working on this all afternoon, trying to think of everything I wanted to say about this and knowing I'm leaving out stuff that might be useful somehow. The truth is, I really need to go take a shower. And then a nap--the good thing about getting well is that every day the nap gets a little shorter.

I'd love it if you've thought about this and know what your purpose is (and aren't you pleased with how I resisted the urge to call it your Special Purpose and reference The Jerk? I knew you would be!) and shared that. I love hearing about it--it's one of my favorite things~~

XO