My sister, Mary, is an interesting character. She is one of the most talented and indecisive people I've ever met, which means she's someone who can do anything but chooses not to. In the span of 10 years she's been a single mother, a student, a wine distributor, a four star chef, a happy housewife, a PTA powerhouse, the co-founder to a four star restaurant, a waitress in that newly three star restaurant, a sommelier, an interior designer, a party planner, and a single mother all over again. The Will & Grace character of Jack McFarland comes to mind as I watch her flit from vocation to vocation, and just like Jack in season six, she has found yet another passion... nursing. How she got from food service and hospitality to the medical field is anybody's guess, but I'm sure Grey's Anatomy had something to do with it. She succeeds at everything and so I am sure she will be a successful nurse... for as long as it sticks. In the meantime, here we are, one 23, the other 41, and both of us back under our parent's roof feeling like failures.
I won't divulge the many heartaches of my sister's life out of respect and love for her and her children, but I will say that over the course of a life only about half what happens is ever in our control. It's Newton's First Law of Motion: Every body remains in a state of rest or motion unless it is acted upon by and external, unbalanced force; or, no change of direction ever happens without cause. Be it mistakes, opportunities, or (usually) the fallings in and out of love, whatever path we chose in life is beset with land mines. One wrong step blows up in your face, and if you find yourself terribly maimed chances are you'll accidentally one-leg hop into another pitfall, and another, and another. We get blown off the path. Before you know it, you're 23 or 41, right back where you started, under your parent's roof feeling like a failure.
Failure. Disappointment. Regret. Shame. It's a steep spiral. All the way down you wonder where it went wrong and who's to blame, generally annoyed by anything and everyone that may be holding you back. Watching TV with Mary a couple of days ago, she turned to me at every joke (in what I found to be a particularly unfunny program) and declared, "Come on that's funny." Even when I smiled, even when I laughed, Mary could not help herself from turning around and insisting on every, single jokes hilarity. Come on that's funny, Come on that's funny, Come on that's funny. 45 minutes later, it was definitely not funny and I regrettably snapped. I looked Mary right in her happy, unassuming eyes and snarled, "Mary! I am not incapable of laughter nor am I incapable of deciding for myself which jokes I find funny. Every time you say, 'Come on that's funny,' it ruins even the funniest moments and it makes me want to punch you in the face. You're annoying the shit out of me!"
I felt satisfied. I felt justified. The outburst was concise, appropriate, and completely called for. Then Mary surprised me. She looked at me and said, "Everything annoys you, NJ. You're so volatile."
Her statement was fair. It knocked the breath from my chest. It was just as accurate and justified as my own outburst, only even more concise and even more called for, cutting as deeply as only the most truthful insults can. Mary is annoying, people have known that for years, but I am volatile and no one had ever told me. Perhaps they were scared; I'm good at blame, boiling people down to their most hurtful qualities in the most well-reasoned ways. I had been a volatile person for weeks, and possibly for my entire life, completely unbeknownst to me.
There were no apologies; there were, in fact, no more words at all for the rest of then night. Mary and I simply watched TV in silence, contemplating our respective un-likabilities and after a few days of deep, deep, uncomfortable thinking, I cannot help but return to the feeling of failure.
The typical person reponds to failure in one of two ways. Some choose to reject the responsibility entirely, careening to a fro, spewing blame and excuses on every plausible canvas. Their shortcoming becomes the fault of others, or of circumstance, of rules, government or God. The failure-action becomes the unavoidable hindrance and the failure-person becomes the victim, blazing past their mistake at a million miles an hour. Nothing is learned and nobody grows.
Other people take failure in the other direction. Instead of grazing over the problems like their predecessors, this other breed of people hug their failure like their fluffiest pillow on their loneliest night. They cry into their failures, they sink into them, they find them comfortable and hold them like a lover. They squeeze, spoon, and molest that pillow deep in the darkness until that failure becomes them. These people love their failures so purely, they never get out of bed.
In terms of these two failures, Mary is the first, I am the second, and neither of us is right. Here we are, both adults, both years of experience wiser, and both of us acting exactly as we did when we were children: stubborn, stupid and small. We stepped on a few land-mines and let that be the death of us. We never understood that to let the paths define your life instead of letting your life define the path is the only place anyone can really fail. Thankfully we're not dead though, which means instead of over, our lives are somewhere in the middle. If we choose it, the best is yet to come.
A failure is a challenge, to recognize it a blessing, and I will work really hard to be less volatile. Today I tried to be compassionate, to laugh, to smile, and to forgive, especially with regards to myself. I worked out with Bianca for an hour and a half and I'm blogging now feeling much better about it than I did about it yesterday.
Don't ever call yourself pathetic. You're not. I swear it.
It's day 12.
Thanks for reading.
See you tomorrow.
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