Miss Mandie

To say I had a near-death experience two nights ago is a tad melodramatic and entirely inaccurate. But for a few moments, I wasn’t sure.

It all started with the nose piercing I recently got. It came out when I clumsily swiped it during the ritual clean before bed. Not thinking anything of it, I tried to put it back in.

I felt a little woozy.

I put my head between my legs to steady myself. Then once I felt okay, I resumed the task of getting the stud back into my nose.

I don’t really know what happened after that.

I remember a collection of really random thoughts running through my head.

I was on the floor.

I had no idea where I was, who I was, or what was going on.

Eventually I could utter “I’m not feeling too well”.

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If this is true, how can success and happiness co-exist?

Is there a difference between doing something we don’t want to do because it makes us feel anxious or it’s boring or it requires energy and effort, to doing something that doesn’t resonate with our core essence/truth/soul?

How do we know the difference?

This has been an interesting conversation in my head lately.

Particularly as I watch myself procrastinate the shit out of completing my studies.

It’s as though I have to drag myself kicking and screaming through the last remaining modules of this course.

A course I have been doing for twelve months.

A course where most of the work has already been done.

A course I could have finished months ago.

A course I wished I had finished months ago.

So what’s my problem?

Albert Gray wrote a speech about his search for the common denominator of successful people. His discovery?

“Successful people formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do”.

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I recently had one of those days.

You know the ones.

The kind of day when everything seems to go wrong.

When nothing seems to flow smoothly or easily.

You are tripped up, tripped over and tripped out…

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I came across an email from a few years ago.

I was searching for my mum’s pumpkin soup recipe and somehow found an old email from a school friend. Says a lot for the apparent “organised” filing of my inbox.

It was an email thread that transported me back to my life in 2006.

At the time I was selling my house, tackling a Masters course, on the verge of exiting the full-time working caper, entangled in an on-again-off-again-aint-no-hope-of-really-going-anywhere relationship, drinking myself silly with friends, financially strapped waiting impatiently for said house sale, and dreaming of future possibilities with that expectant feeling that something big was about to happen.

What struck me the most was the hyperactive tone of my email reply.

“Could Mandie be abusing amphetamines?” would have been a completely acceptable response to reading such an overuse of the humble exclamation mark and repeated reassurance of just how full and amazing life was at the time.

I wasn’t taking many drugs back then, but I was busy.

Busy worrying, busy working, busy studying, busy socialising, busy creating “house sale dramas and nightmares”, busy drinking, busy pining, busy trying to work out the answers, busy gossiping, busy reassuring, busy dieting, busy story telling, busy arguing, busy complaining, busy planning, busy getting ahead.

Our society is great at helping people who want to be busy.

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