Do you really want to be successful? I am beginning to wonder if I really want to be successful. I used to care, and now I am not at all sure.
Until my father was ill, and my mother unaware that she was not really well enough to take care of him, all I cared about was getting ahead. It did not really matter how I managed it, it is a family failing that we rate financial and work related worth above anything else. The reason for this is fairly simple – my father was uncommunicative and yet went from being a school truant to having a successful business and restoring a beautiful house, which we then proceeded to run into the ground until I restored it all over again fifty years later whilst looking after him and mother.
In the course of my early ‘getting ahead’ journey, I got to my version of the top of my career in five years, created several businesses before capitulating to my family’s delusions of middle class grandeur and stupidly attempting to switch career in my early thirties.
Studies have shown that large breasted women are considered to be less able at work. Pair this with a riot of curls and cripplingly tough work ethic, and even I can see why insecure employers preferred the nearest spotty boy. Alongside this, I am guilty of becoming bored easily and attempting to solve problems which nobody else has either noticed, or been bothered by as long as the mortgage is being paid at the end of the month.
I am a pain in the ass, and what’s worse is that it is not safe for a standard thoughtless male manager to assume that I would rather be in bed with some tiresome guy making babies than working. My appearance is extremely misleading. I suppose that this should be in the past tense, since I no longer care or have time.
Right now, success depends on my doing sufficient writing and sewing. I am currently having difficulty moving due to severe pain from binge working on the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing Collection. A little attention is a dangerous thing with me, because I am inclined to set deadlines nobody else would set, just to express wishes nobody cares about. I am determined not to write unless I feel like it, however, as I very much took to heart the quotation from Agatha Christie that she knew she was a writer when she was writing material that she did not like to a deadline. Particularly with the Best Ever books, this is not a good idea.
I tried a couple of massages this week, and this morning by the time they had made it to the right shoulder I was in floods of tears. By the time they had finished I could barely move, and have been in considerable pain all day. All because I was trying to create a new tagline, which is not even for my benefit, since any money made by the artwork is to be ploughed into the Better Person Project. Why was I even bothering? It is not like I could have expected anything but disparagement from my audience of one, and not even because of any actual thoughts in his head. So I was crippling myself to defeat someone else’s daddy issues. If the object of one’s affection does not like himself, it is highly unlikely that he will ever like you.
It is not the first time I have overworked on someone else’s issues, for no real reason. It is part of my own madness that I create abstract non-communication in an effort to encourage self-healing. I have no idea why I do it, I just know that I have to, so I might as well do something with it. Such is the nature of creation. Often your hands know what your brain doesn’t, so rolling with it is a short cut.
Anyway, at least my emotional state has tangible benefits in the form of the books and objects, and I am marginally more confident that what might appear to be an exercise in futility, might actually have a point, since evidently I am pretty good at failing now.
I just wish that sewing was not quite so bad for you, and that the driving force behind it was not quite so miserable. I see many people who turn their misery into success psychosis, and I wonder if it is not better to be mediocre and happy?