my friend claudia, who i have so much in common with, i could be related to, did a song and dance the other day about this ridiculously successful woman who is married to a mega gazillionaire she used to go out with. "if i hadn't been so needy, so whiney, so immature, such a total and complete mess," i could have been her," claudia said while sitting on the picnic table at the dog park. "if you had a head and body transplant you could have been her," i said.
i can fall fall into this trap too, wishing i were someone else, someone else who seems to be made of entirely different genegic material and is able to turn every damn thing she touches with perfectly manicured fingers into gold, but the thing is, i'm not that. i'm me. and me grew up with a secret alcoholic father who did his best to bestow me with a self-confidence so low, an ant can't crawl under it. an uber loving mom who never left the man who stole my optimism and nobody helping me to create a positive, exciting adulthood. no, i don't have my friend deb's ability to do 100 things in a day, nicole's skill at running two houses and a family of 3 with the aplomb of a dancer for the ny ballet, toni's keen and innate competence when it comes to all things home, sarah's capacity for having a killer bod and a killer career. but i didn't start where any of them started. i started in a whole other place, and anything i've done in my life, i have had to sort of do on my own. i have to measure my success, however minimal, by the distance i've traveled, not by comparing myself to martha stewart.
so, claudia, think about your beginnings, which you've told me were not optimal and then figure out how many times around the track you had to go before you even got to the starting gate, and then let's talk about that woman and all the other ones like her. nope, you aren't her, but that doesn't mean you're not just as amazing.
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