Having it all.

Yesterday, I was running a few errands and ended up taking a wrong street and had to turn around within a wealthy neighborhood. (Side bar...drop me in the middle of Cambodia and I can navigate my way around the streets...but put me in the middle of the town I grew up in for 23 solid years and I will get turned around in a heartbeat.) As I was driving through this neighborhood, mouth agape at all the richness, the thought entered my head; you're almost 30 and you still don't even own your own home, much less something like this. I then had to shake myself, quite literally, out of that thought process.

Sometime within the last couple of months, I met a woman through an acquaintance of mine...lets call her Suzy. I was out at lunch with my acquaintance and Suzy and after eating our meals and chatting about various random topics, Suzy looked at me and said, "I would have thought you had everything, you know, it all." The statement was jarring. I asked her what she meant by it and she responded with, "Well, until I got to know you better, I assumed you lived in a nice big home, had the marriage, 2.4 kids, white picket fence...you know...it all."  I think I may have just stared at her at first. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this woman, who was obviously comfortable enough to not only make these assumptions, but to say them out loud to me. Did she not think I would get offended? Upset? How dare she! She didn't know me well enough to say these things to me! Do I not have it all? Because I was just starting to feel comfortable with my life path, and now I'm being told it isn't enough? All of these thoughts and emotions ran through my blood in about .02 seconds. Then, all of a sudden, I felt sorry for this woman. She must be so sad and frustrated and angry because she thinks that all the above mentioned things are what it means to have "it all."(I would like to take this time to point out that my brilliant friend recently wrote and published a book called "Can Spiritual Women Say F*$k: A Jersey Girl's guide to Inner Peace. It's amazing and brilliant and some of things she talks about sort of go along with this post so I would be remiss (and an awful friend) if I didn't mention it. I'm not very tech savvy and can't figure out how to post a link to Amazon, but please check it out. Jess Barrett, you have helped me more than you will ever know.)

I know how tiring it is to try to keep up with what the world tells us is the perfect life, but I had finally woken myself up from that perceived reality; and I wanted desperately to wake Suzy up. When I told her my thoughts on the subject, she looked at me like I belonged in a mental facility for the criminally insane. I asked her if she ever thought that she was forcing an unrealistic ideal upon herself and she gave me a blank look as if to say, "Have you ever thought that you aren't?! And are wrong for not doing so?" My acquaintance was beginning to get antsy with all the tension in the air so I swiftly changed the subject. I know Suzy isn't the only person I'm going to run into who thinks how I'm deciding to live my life is mental, but I don't understand how other people don't understand. Don't get me wrong, I'm not perfect by any means. I still find myself secretly judging others for their choices and then have to slap myself in the face and say, You have no idea what their unique path in life is so cut it out." 

So, there you have it. Kel Cooley calls B.S on this whole "it all" crap. Your "all" may not be the same as mine and that's perfectly ok. We were not all put on this earth for the same exact purpose. How boring would that be?  All we can do is focus on our own passions and paths. And for goodness sake, burn that damn white picket fence in effigy!