Shit You Don’t Admit: Being a Chickenshit About Your Dreams

Welcome to the second installment of “Shit You Don’t Admit,” a three-part series about all the things everyone feels, but no one admits.  My second admission:  I’m too chickenshit to go after my dreams.

When I cry during reality TV shows like American Idol, The Voice or Project Runway, I’m crying because the contestants have, against all odds, had the cajones to go after their dreams and I have not.  I’m getting teary-eyed because I know the fear of instability I carry around that keeps me from risking anything significant to get what I want.

I’m amazed by the sheer number of people I know personally who don’t share my tolerance for misery.  I laud their ability to step back from financial stability to find their own joy instead.  I am impressed by the ones I know and love and I kinda hate the ones who I think have been successful without deserving it.  But really that’s just me being angry with myself.

I grew up in a relatively stable home financially but my parents constantly griped about money.  There was also constant threat of divorce and this terrified me.  It seemed clear to me that my parents were barely holding it together to fund one household and that financing two households would have broken them.  I imagined moving from my nice middle class, suburban neighbourhood to some ghetto in the city and going to school with the rough kids that I played against in basketball.  I wanted no part of that.  I didn’t want to be like Julia Stiles in that dance movie where she moves to the inner city and has to learn to get by on less.

I was hard up for cash during university like everyone else, but by age 30 I was doing a bit better than average.  I remember that I didn’t care what I did for a living as long as it afforded me the ability to get most of what I wanted when I wanted it (thankfully I didn’t want Louis Vuitton bags or Hermes scarves).  But that ability has kept me in a job I hate for years.  My unwillingness to take a pay cut rendered me inert.

I had a performance review once during which my boss said to me that “there are people who do what they love and there are people who do what they do so they can do what they love.  And there’s no shame in being the latter.”  I don’t know if she was saying that for me as much as for herself, but I repeated those words like an anthem for years.  Mostly I was trying to convince myself that this job was enough for me long past the point when it became clear that it wasn’t.

If I’m brutally honest I have to add that I’ve often been completely unwilling to work consistently at anything that didn’t offer a guaranteed outcome.  Which is kind of the very definition of chasing any dream.  There will be much failure, much rejection and then hopefully, someday, success.  I’ve refused to bite that particular bullet and tend to cry foul once I’ve experienced a failure or a couple rejections.  I am loath to call myself lazy, but I think, secretly, I probably am.  I mean I watch a shitload of TV and isn’t that generally a hallmark of the lazy?

I was really gung ho around the end of last year about chasing my dreams, but each passing month has brought greater clarity about that idea and what it really entails.  I’m starting to see less of the glitter of it and more of the hard work involved, even if it’s the just the hard work of giving up the level of comfort and stability I’ve enjoyed for so long.

Shit You Don’t Admit: Materialism

This began as a post-therapy journal entry in which I just started to admit things that are embarrassing.  In the course of these confessional musings, I got to thinking about all of the that shit most of us never admit out loud.  Some of those issues struck me as blog-worthy fodder, so, coming at you in three installments, here is “Shit You Don’t Admit.”  The first of these:  materialism.

I really like my comfortable life.  It’s not so much that I’m attached to my stuff as much as I’m addicted to consumption.  This, despite the fact that it doesn’t make me happy.  People who attain home ownership and two cars in the drive rarely admit that it makes them miserable or that maybe it’s not worth the stress.  In the same way, I find it hard to admit that being reasonably well paid hasn’t brought me financial security, but instead a consumption habit that’s very hard to kick.

The kicker is that no one admits this.  We are taught to be consumers from the moment we leave the womb and then we’re supposed to feel bad about being materialistic.  We’re made to feel ashamed about it when an enormous part of our economy is fueled by our very materialism.  We are supposed to have it all materially and somehow also have it all spiritually.  I’m supposed to eat, pray and love and consume constantly, too.

Ironically, I would never call myself materialistic.  In fact, I’d be mad if someone did.  And I’m kind of self-righteous about my materialism because I’m not fixated on style or designer labels.  But it’s clear that my vast array of yoga pants and sweat shirts from Old Navy is indicative of a problem.  I get way too much out of the thrill of the buy.  The bulk of my consumption has little to do with basics like shelter, food and enough clothing to keep me decent.  It’s mostly about convenience, saving face, avoiding emotions and trying to make myself acceptable.  I am a product of my product-driven culture in all the worst ways.

Lean in close and I’ll tell you a related secret.  I hate celebrities and celebrity culture because it makes me aware that I feel so damn inadequate.  When I start to feel inadequate, what follows, in my head, is there must be something wrong with me.  Not that there’s something wrong with the media machine or celebrity culture or advertising.  Nope, it’s gotta be me.  And in my quest to fix myself I do exactly what my culture says I should do–I go out and consume.  I sign up for Weight Watchers, I buy a new cardigan, I buy some more exercise videos or I  just buy a very big piece of cake if I’m not feeling particularly hopeful about fixing myself that day.  I own about 10 exercise videos and I’ve used them for maybe a combined total of 10 hours.  Maybe.  Maybe less.  Purchasing more of these clearly isn’t going to help me feel better about myself.

Exercise videos, cardigans and Weight Watchers aren’t problematic inherently, but the culture that dictates that I’ll stop feeling inadequate by way of these things is.  Ultimately I still feel bad about myself despite all of this consumption and I wonder if what I’m holding onto when I hold so tight to (the illusion of) financial freedom is the freedom to keep trying to fix myself.

But there’s hope.  Sitting in a quiet, sunny park writing this blog post, I feel a great deal of calm and contentment.  I recognize that it’s a kind of calm and contentment that the new cardigan I wore today can’t bring.  It’s the kind that can’t be bought, period.

This is usually the point in my blog post when I’d make some declaration about how I’m going to change, but I’m going to skip that.  I recently heard about a study in which it was found that people who tell others about their goals, tend not to work as hard toward those goals, so I think it’s best to keep my mouth shut.  I will say that I’m tired to death of how consumer culture makes me feel and I want to stop playing the game.  What about you?

Post script:  I started writing this post back in the first week of May.  As of today, May 15th, I’m facing the possibility that I may be laid off in the coming week or that the company I work for may cease to exist.  The way I’ve been spending up until now is the reason why I don’t have an emergency fund.  Whatever happens, my consumption will likely be nipped in the bud no matter what.  Tell the universe what you want and it provides (grin).