Being Happy …
I saw this quote on Facebook the other day and thought about how perfect it was in relationship to the last post I wrote.
I need to do that. Be happy with my life and where it’s at.
For the most part, I think I am … I’m lucky to be married to my best friend and that makes all the difference in the world. I have someone I can implicitly trust all my hopes and fears. I have someone who has been with me to h*ll and back with all the curve balls life has thrown me. And he’s still standing next to me.
So I guess you can say I succeeded in being with someone that makes me happy. Now, what should I do to be that someone that makes me happy?
I guess it starts with figuring out what makes me unhappy and making a change from there.
More Than a Woman?
Tired. That’s how I’ve felt this past weekend. I think the 10-hour days are catching up with me and I’m not looking forward to Monday when it will start all over again.
I think it’s time to take some time off. Maybe a scheduled mental health day to regroup myself. On a Monday. Or a Friday. So I can extend my weekend by an extra day.
Oh, who am I kidding? I’m still going to spend the day before returning to work worrying about what I need to do the day I actually return to work.
I worry too much. Not a surprise for people that know me very well. To others though, especially at work, I guess I put off this vibe that everything is going to be okay. But internally, I’m a nervous wreck.
Why is that?
Hubby seems to think I put too much pressure on myself, that I should learn to ease up on myself. That I should learn to break down projects into manageable tasks. And he’s right, the smart man that I married.
I do put a lot of pressure on myself to be as best that I can be. I guess it goes back to that thought that if I try hard enough, I’ll succeed in anything I do.
And we all know that Infertility taught me that that statement is not always relevant to everything.
So why am I still living my life like that? I guess I do it in the hopes of being a better person than would be if I had kids. That somehow, I need to make up for being more of a woman because I don’t have kids.
Does that sound ridiculous?
I know it does. There are lots of women living child-free by choice that can attest to this. Heck, there are women that have gone through infertility and are now living child-free that can say that they still feel like a whole woman.
Right now, I’m not one of those women.
Which is why I worry too much. And expect more out of myself. And I wish there was a way that I could just be happy with who I am.
Failure = Success?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the post I wrote last week and how failure has shaped my life over the past decade or so. Then my Hubby sent this article to me that talks about how failure can actually turn into success.
I’m not sure how I feel about the article. I mean, I get what the message is; that in order to succeed you have to allow failure into your life. That we can learn from our failures.
So what have I learned from my failures? Losing a job taught me that nothing in life is ever “stable.” Moving back to Detroit from Chicago after my Dad passed away taught me that guilt is a strong enough motivator. Infertility taught me that not everything that you give 100% into will result in success.
Not necessarily happy things, right? Truth is, failure has taught me to be more wary of people, of situations. The once confident woman that I was in my twenties, has morphed into a 40-year old woman with more self-esteem issues than a teenager.
What I need to do, as Hubby keeps telling me, is realize that I should let go of these failures and move on. And I need to realize that everything I do won’t necessarily fail; that even little things in life (and work) can be a success.
I need to believe in myself.
Dark Spaces and Other Things
I went to a dark space this past week. I went back to the land of longing for a child of my own.
That’s a place, while always in the back of my mind, that I haven’t been to in a long time.
It started when I found out that a newer co-worker of mine had triplets. So naturally I asked if this was a surprise to her when she found out she was having triplets. That’s when I found out that she and her husband had done IVF and had succeeded with pregnancy after their second try; a frozen cycle from the remaining embryos from her first try.
D*mn it. I was jealous.
So jealous that I thought of our one failed IVF cycle and the failed ability to even have tried a frozen cycle. Which then had me thinking that if we did succeed with our cycle, our child/children would be 9 years old.
Nine. Years. Old. What a different person I might have become if we were successful.
Maybe I wouldn’t be such a sad person inside. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so anxious all the time. Maybe I wouldn’t be so afraid of failure like I am about everything in my life.
I know. I’m realistic enough to know I could still be the same person I am today, with or without kids. However, I do know that my fear of failure stems from the belief that I grew up with: If you try hard at anything, you will succeed.
Except as hard as Hubby & I tried to conceive, we did not succeed.
Failing at trying to procreate was the first time I ever had to question that belief. The corresponding darkness that followed our failed IVF only allowed me more time to question whether anything I do would only result in failure.
So the dark place I was at this week? It all boiled down to my fear of failure in EVERYTHING I do. From feeling like I’m a failure at work, to feeling like I’m a failure in my personal life.
I’m still a little fragile from this past week … probably will be for a while, if I’m being honest with myself … but I’m trying to be better. Trying to realize that sometimes failures can be opportunities for improvement. And trying to remember that mistakes are really just mis-takes.