It’s just textbook stuff…

 Imogen Heap – Download Speeding Cars and listen while reading this post…  

I haven’t been to therapy now for a little over 3 months. I miss it sometimes, but I realized toward the end that he wasn’t helping me that much any more. He gave me the tools that I needed to fix my problems and now the onus is on me to use those tools.

What have I learned in the last year, a year that has seen me move out of an apartment and in with my real dad and then in with friends and then into a new house? A year trhat included starting therapy and dancing with the Mavericks? A year that has been filled with some of the most wonderful surprises and biggest let downs?  Slow down.

For me my whole life has been a series of rushed plans. I always have a number of goals that are choreographed simultaneously with a plethora of jobs, duties, and a sprinkling of relationships.  With all of these plates balanced and spinning on sticks, eventually I over-do it and one of the plate falls and shatters in a million pieces and instead of stopping and pausing to learn from my mistake I just pick up another plate or two and start the spinning all over again.

I don’t know what type of disorder I have or if it is a disorder at all, I may just be human. What does happen to me is this – I agree to do 500 things and then I get exhausted and tired and instead of being upset at myself for saying “yes” 500 times, I direct my anger and frustration at the person that invited me to do whatever it was that I agreed to. I often feel pressured into planning events or going places that I don’t really have time to do and I hate to let people down and so I end up making commitments that I don’t really want to keep.

Right now I have 50 projects I want to do around my house. I want to design and make my own curtains, design pillows out of vintage fabrics for my couch and paint some intricate “modern country” paintings for my walls. I want to decorate and furnish all three bedrooms and remodel my bathrooms and kitchen. I want to landscape my yard and build a deck and put in new windows and paint the trim on my house. I need to paint the garage and inuslate my attic better.  I want a new TV, dining room table, coffee table, a new TV stand, and I want to put sand colored rock around my fireplace.

 With all these wants I have to remind myself to slow down.

I’m also making some great strides with my career and my plate at work is unbelievably full. I’m planning meetings and conferences, creating websites and training documents and all the while still supporting my customer base. I can’t let it get to me, I have to just slow down.

Now I’m in a relationship and with a great girl and things are going well. Last week we had a dinner party on Thursday night, a football game on Friday night and then dinner with my friends at Joe T. Garcia’s on Saturday night. We were supposed to go to church together on Sunday morning and then later that day I had a 2 o’clock barbecue planned with my family and I found myself getting a little overwhelmed. I had to tell Mary, “I’m going to have to pass on church.” Of all the things I should not have passed on, church was one of them, but I just knew it would kill me to drive to Irving and back and then drop Mary off at her place and then drive to Sanger and then back to Plano. Mary works with middle school children at 5 in the afternoon and so she couldn’t make the barbecue with me or else I probably would have tried to squeeze it all in, but in the end I think I made the right decision. I had to tell myself to slow down.

We get all wrapped up in this crazy life with our goals and dreams. There are outside pressures from society, people expect you to be in a relationship, well-meaning friends and family want you to be happy and to fall in love and then there are the pressures you put on yourself. There are a lot of things in this life that can come in and complicate things and if life were like the movies and people fell in love and lived happily ever after then I could worry less and hurry more – but the reality of it is, most marriages fail. Relationships are complicated, people are human. We don’t understand the importance of patience, waiting is not part of our American Culture.

So now I’m taking advice from Imogen Heap, her song Speeding Cars sums it up best. Don’t lose your head… it’s just textbook stuff…

Here’s the day you hoped would never come
Don’t feed me violence
just run with me through rows of speeding cars.
The papercuts the cheating lovers
The coffee’s never strong enough
i know you think it’s more than just bad luck

There there baby
it’s just text book stuff
it’s in the ABC of growing up
Now now darling
oh don’t lose your head
cause none of us were angels
and you know I love you yeah