grow the hell up – Sweat & Sparkle

I don’t pretend to be an expert in self-growth, but I do know that no real growth can take place when it is smothered with self-pity, victim playing, and a refusal to accept responsibility for your own decisions and actions. It is impossible to move forward if you have cemented yourself to the past and insist on begging everyone to feel sorry for you and watch you bleed from wounds you tore open yourself.

I suspect that’s the ulterior motive for some people. If you package yourself as a perpetual victim, then you don’t have to change anything. You don’t have to actually do anything at all. You can whine, complain, sob, whimper, and moan, which is a hell of a lot easier than taking a good, honest look in the mirror and tackling the hard work of change and improvement. You can sit back and wallow in the sympathy and hand-holding of enablers instead of being an adult.

To me, that is failure. But for someone who never intends to change, who only wants attention and drama, who just wants to brush off responsibility by pointing at others and bitching their way through life, I guess that’s considered success, in a pathetic sort of way.

When your heart festers with lies, bitterness, jealousy, and pettiness, it’s absurd to pretend that the real problem is anyone or anything else. In fact, it’s downright stupid. When your norm in all aspects of life is chaos, conflict, and combat, you have got to stop denying the truth: the common denominator is you. Only a fiercely immature and unlikeable person is incapable of self-examination and unaccepting of any responsibility in his or her choices in life.

Again, I don’t pretend to be perfect. I don’t have it all figured out. Recently I found myself slipping back into old habits, and I started leaning on worn-out excuses: I work a lot. I’m tired. I deserve a break. Blah blah blah. I refused to accept that from myself. Have I worked so hard to make positive changes in my life, in me, just to regress to unhelpful and negative choices? I matter too much to me to do that. My loved ones matter too much to me to do that.

I suspect I have stumbled across another key point: when you simply don’t care about anyone but yourself, then you are not motivated to do better or to be better for them. They are not worth the effort. I am grateful that I am not in that position. I am sorry for anyone who chooses to remain in a state of interminable rot, with pity and drama filling their lives instead of true caring or meaningful relationships. I could never settle for that, but clearly, some people can. They will never know what they are missing, but I do.

Run with That

I never understood couples who constantly break up and get back together. Even in high school, I knew better than to join back up with someone after we had split. I didn’t see the point. You already know what you’re getting, and you already know you don’t like it.

In one in a million instances, two people might find their way to each other, having learned something from the separation, and actually be happy this time around. The rest of them, though — the overwhelming majority — simply torment each other, annoy everyone else, break up again in a storm of drama, realize that no one else wants their crazy asses, and go right back to each other in a dysfunctional dance of foolishness.

It’s a dance I never wanted to see the kids leaping into, but I suppose it was almost inevitable. Children learn what they live. Their time with us was fleeting, a weekend here and there. What they lived, day in and day out, has been instability, chaos, maniacally shifting from feigned highs to crash-and-burn lows. Love is not pure and giving, they saw; it is selfish, doled out or withheld based on compliance. It is not steady and unwavering; it is switched on and off, fickle, used like a tool. How were they supposed to learn to seek healthy, happy relationships?

We’ve talked with the kids, of course, but words go into one ear and out the other. We are the oddity. Peace, contentment, and love must be deafeningly silent in the face of screaming, fighting, attention-demanding drama. We were blotted out by hysteria and frenzy, the cacophony of insanity and immaturity that they embrace as normal. Why wouldn’t they? It’s what they are used to. It’s home.

The kids deserved better role modeling, but they are also old enough to realize that something isn’t quite right with that pattern of behavior. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand that the actions and choices they have witnessed are not the products of healthy or balanced minds.

I am forced to take the same stance as I do with so much else in the kids’ lives: I pray for better for them. I want them to choose better for themselves. I have talked, guided, and encouraged all I can. They have to take it from here. May they take a deep, hard look at what they have lived, then decide they can do better — and I know they can — and run with that in their hearts, as far as they possibly can, as high as they can. I want them to want more for themselves and know that they deserve better. They always have.

Backward

Back in high school (yes, we’re going back to ancient history here), I briefly dated a young man who couldn’t seem to stop talking about his ex-girlfriend. He had nothing nice to say about her, but all the same, every topic of conversation was a gateway to chatting about her.

After a while, I gently but firmly broke up with this young man, telling him that if he ever got over his ex-girlfriend, then maybe we could talk. He was stunned, insisting he already was over her, and reminded me that he never said anything good about her.

True enough. But it was evident that she was foremost in his mind, because she was always on the tip of his tongue, and I refused to play second place. Even as a naive high school girl, I knew there was something wrong, something unfinished, with someone who can’t stop blabbing about his ex.

(By the way, I turned out to be right. Any surprises there? Not long after I broke up with him, he got back together with the ex he swore he couldn’t stand. It didn’t last long, but maybe that time around, he finally found some closure).

Fast forward almost 30 years, and not much has changed. No, I’m not still listening to that fellow prattle on and on about his ex, but I am reminded in many ways, by many people, just how much my husband and I are on his ex’s mind.

I am reminded of that high school boy, claiming he was over his ex, swearing he hated his ex, yet always and forever more talking about his ex. Sounds very familiar! If, nearly 13 years after you split, you are still jabbering endlessly about your ex, then just face it: you are not over that person. You have unfinished business. Only you know precisely what that is. (And, more than likely, only you care what that is.) But for heaven’s sake, stop lying to yourself and everyone who is forced to listen to you, and just admit what everyone already knows anyway.

Something else hasn’t changed since those long-ago high school days: I still don’t have any patience for senseless drama. I didn’t want to be part of that silly love triangle back then, and I don’t want to be part of immature games now. It’s sad that I was more of an adult before I was old enough to drive than so many people are now, in the midst of their mid-life crises.

Give me my family, my kitty, my books, my garden, and of course my blog, and I am happy. I don’t have any interest in much else going on around me. The older I get, the smaller my social circle gets, and I prefer it that way.

I can’t fathom being fascinated with what someone from my past is doing. I actually like my ex-husband, because at one time, I truly loved him, and I still think he is a good person. But I also have to admit I rarely think of him (that whole “ex” and not “current” thing). The idea of spending my days, this long after our split, foaming at the mouth in a frenzy to find out what he is doing, who he’s with, what she’s like, where they are going…bah, I can’t even work up the energy to finish the sentence. I just have so much else to think about and devote my attention to, in my life NOW.

Maybe that is the root of the problem for people like Psycho. There is nothing in their lives now that matters nearly as much as something (or someone) who used to be there. Knowing that so many people have exited your life because they choose life without you over life with you…well, I’m sure that sucks. But I’m also sure that at some point, some deep self-examination is in order, when key people from your childhood through your adulthood are repelled and seek better options elsewhere.

Harsh? Maybe. But also true. Obsessing over the past and people who no longer care won’t change anything. Refusing to be honest won’t let you see where the problem originates, and not being adult enough to admit the problem might be staring back at you in the mirror just means you will always be stuck in one place, gazing backward, reaching for something that isn’t there anymore and doesn’t want to be there. Because life marched right past, long ago, and is way, way ahead of you.

People-who-cant-let-go-of-someone

Enough Already

I am not a Lady Gaga fan. Not my style of music, and I see her as basically a minimally-talented attention seeker. I’m sure she doesn’t lie awake at night, obsessing about my opinion in between deciding what to spend her millions on, and anyway, why I am sharing this with you?

Because I love football, and I watched the Super Bowl and sort of watched Lady Gaga’s halftime performance. I thought it was more lights flashing and sparks flying and silly costumes than it was an actual musical performance, but obviously it wasn’t geared toward my style. (Does anyone just wear jeans and a t-shirt and sing their songs and let that be that anymore?)

I ended up scrolling through my Facebook feed to see how my friends were reacting to the Patriots being at the losing end of the game (at halftime, anyway). I stopped when I read a post a friend of mine had liked. A woman I don’t know had written “Lady Gaga needs a tummy tuck!” followed by “LOL” and some smiley faces.

I am so ripping, blazing, freaking sick of women being held up to be critiqued, insulted, torn apart, analyzed, and put down based exclusively on whether they are skin and bones enough for our dumbass society. What the hell did Lady Gaga’s tummy have to do with her performance? Hell, I didn’t even notice her tummy or any other specific body part, maybe because I’m a mature human being who was focused on the performance as a whole, whether I liked it or not, not itching to put down a woman based on absurd societal standards.

Can you tell it made me mad?

I don’t know the woman who posted that, but since she posted it publicly and it ended up on my feed because a so-called friend of mine liked it, I responded to her post by telling her that it’s fine if she didn’t like Lady Gaga’s performance, but critiquing and insulting her body as a form of cheap entertainment really should have been beneath her.

A funny thing happened. Before my comment, about 17 people liked her post, and of those, 15 were women. After my comment, suddenly people stopped liking it, as if it had to be pointed out to them that it was a childish and pointless post, or it just wasn’t cool to join in anymore.

The saddest part is, my friend who liked it struggles continually with her weight. It seems very hypocritical to like a nasty comment about someone else’s body. If someone told her she needed a tummy tuck, she’d burst into tears or flee to Facebook for comforting comments and reassurance, and everyone would slam whoever said it instead of liking it and making smiley faces to indicate how oh-so-humorous they thought it was.

Whether I like Lady Gaga or not, I have to admit, the performance required a lot of work, a lot of practice, a lot of coordination of a zillion moving parts all at once. When is our society ever going to focus on what a woman does instead of how she looks? I bet no one analyzed or critiqued how any of the football players looked last night, whether their uniform was looking a little tight, whether any of the guys might need some specific cosmetic procedure. No, they were allowed to come out, do a job, and be recognized for their performance, what they DO, not what they look like.

It’s high time…actually, way past time…that we pay women the same respect.

And really, what’s with 15 of the 17 likes being from women? What the hell is there to like about a bitchy comment about another woman’s body? Petty much? Did insulting Lady Gaga suddenly make them drop 20 pounds? What’s in it for them?

We women have a long, long battle ahead of us if we are still fighting other women. That’s beyond sad. That’s pathetic. I don’t give a free pass to the men who liked it, because they are jackasses too, but come on, ladies. Can we at least lead by example and not step on our own necks and each other, and call it humor or entertainment and anything except what it truly is, a mindless and spineless waste of time and childish, trifling, and shallow crap?