The year of trying really really hard to take myself less seriously

I had lofty aspirations for this year to be The Year of Taking Myself Less Seriously.

Of course, if a person has lofty aspirations then she’s already taken herself seriously, because how can you loftily aspire to something while also being super casual and relaxed? So maybe right there I failed. What I should have done was gotten a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, the large size, and eaten the whole thing without stopping and then licked the orange powder from my fingers while casually contemplating the prospect of taking myself less seriously. With that kind of start I’d have been one-hundred-percent guaranteed to succeed.

As it was, I’ve been unable to meet said lofty expectations.

Like for instance, it’s not just that I get stressed out if I feel too busy, but also if I feel not busy enough. Because what does that say about me???

And then there’s our old friend money anxiety. When I was a kid Dad helpfully taught me to translate the price of something into how long it would take me to earn it based on my hourly wage. And now that’s a habit I would really like to rid myself of, especially since the writing wage hovers around $0 hourly. So I find myself contemplating the purchase of a block of cheese at Whole Foods: At $0/hour, how long to earn $22 block of cheese?

I stand and stare at the cheese with a contorted look of horror, which forces other shoppers to navigate their carts around me, thereby pissing off the busy important people who shop at Whole Foods. And later, with numbers and calculations tabulating inside my head, I switch to Stop & Shop.

Among other telltale signs of being just a tad on the serious side, there’s the festering insecurity of what if you don’t like this blog post.

And just in general the fact that I’m doing this writer thing, which, as I’ve mentioned, brought a whole pile of rejections, and now I feel the clutching anxiety that everyone knows my stuff is no good. Which prompted me to turn earnestly to my notebook and write the following equation, with no sense of irony whatsoever:

workhorse  x  long time  =  craft

So right there you can see that I haven’t exactly made staggering progress at becoming this bundle of spontaneous and light-hearted fun, despite my high hopes at the outset.

Then there’s Twitter, which makes me feel like a failure. A typical thirty-second foray into Twitter involves noticing that someone else has 23K followers. I have 622. Wait, 621? Someone defected. If that was you, please come back!

There’s a work crew outside my window. I imagine they’re constantly judging me. I’m sure they’re thinking, “What’s this lady doing home all day, doesn’t she have a job? And is she wearing sweatpants again today?”

I bought a new pen and it doesn’t work. I get disproportionately frustrated: This pen was three friggin dollars!!! At $0/hour, how long to earn another pen?

So you can see that perhaps I haven’t made as great of progress toward taking myself less seriously as I had hoped back in January when the sixteen feet of snow frosted the trees in that picturesque way, and I sat here and sipped my tea and wrote to you about how 2015 was going to be different.

Though I could still go out and grab that bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.