Be Your Best Self

On Sunday Decoybetty* wrote a post that, in summary, expressed how she often finds it hard for herself to just be happy, damnit for people in her life who seem to have been blessed by good luck. (It’s a bad summary of the post, admittedly, but if you want to read the original you should. For the purpose of this blog, however, we’re going to say that is what her post was about.)

It struck a chord with me and got me to thinking. I do that. I do that all the time. I make comparisons to other people’s lives and wish that mine were parallel or often times better than theirs. Why can’t I fill in the blank?? Why can’t I travel more, work for a major design label, have a family with money coming out their ears, go to Paris on a long weekend, have expensive dinners with famous people, join the expectant mom crowd, and the list goes on and on and on.

Of course as we all know I am not these people who have oodles of money, who get to travel all over the world, who get to take a jaunt to Paris for a weekend in the fall, or work for a glamorous company frequented by celebrities. I don’t get to have dinners with famous people and, frankly, I don’t even want to be a part of the expectant mom crowd. So why am I so jealous of them?

Ultimately the question is left unanswered in my head. It's any number of combinations of 'low self-esteem', 'grass is always greener', 'I'm the ninety-nine percent' and 'marxist-lenin complex'. I have all of that going on and then some. I am doing just fine but I want more. I am greedy, lusting for the things that always earmarked the 'in' crowd in my life, a group of whom I was always a vulture just on the outside, eager to pick up the left overs from the days kill. I want, therefore I am.

I want to stop.

I want to stop comparing myself to everyone else in my life - my sister, my mother, my friends, my co-workers. I want to stop trying to be who they are and be a little more of what I am.

I am not perfect, though. I am a clinically depressed woman with a mood disorder, twenty-five pounds "overweight" (or at least over my desired weight), with a foul mouth, a sale charactre (shitty attitude) as Husband puts it, and a severe lack of personal motivation. Most people, on meeting me, would not describe me as such. Au contraire. But this is not at all about how other people see me: it's about how I see myself.

After a work week particularly full of fuck-ups and minor mistakes that added up to annoyances for higher ups, I taped this phrase to my computer monitor: Be Your Best Self. I asked myself "Am I being my best self? My best, hardest working employee?" and was disappointed to find the answer was no. I realized that, no matter how many vacations I could take, no matter how many Marc Jacob hand bags I could buy, no matter how many babies I could shove out of my loins (if that was something I decided I wanted), I would never be happy with giving less than my best, work or otherwise.

I wasn't happy being depressed. I wasn't happy punching walls and curling up into a ball on the bathroom floor. I am not happy with my weight and I am not happy with my shitty attitude. I want to be more than what I am. If that never adds up to a coastal home in the south of France or a trip around the world, I don't care. If I am not the best person I expect myself to be I will never be happy.

Will that end the jealousy? That's another question unanswered. Probably no. I am human, with human desires and human faults. But as long as I am my best self, a little jealousy never hurt anyone.

Boo is always his best self, regardless of his crazy parents.

* look for a guest post from her soon!