In May of 2022, I slammed my foot on the clutch of my life and threw it into fifth gear by launching this business, The Task Mistress. It had been an idea idling in my brain for a long time, but not going anywhere. A friend said I should start selling my toolkits to other entrepreneurs, and suddenly a whole business plan unfolded in my brain. I built a website. I created email lists, and this newsletter, and pages on social media (still need to set up an instagram, but I’m procrastinating, shhhhhhh!). But the story — my story — goes back much farther than that.
All of us have the pull to do something extraordinary, but when we travel an inauthentic path we become extraordinarily ordinary. ~ Wes Moore
One day in late 2007, I woke up in bed, stared at the ceiling, and thought to myself: I have nothing to live for.
As I’ve stressed to close friends over the years, this was not any kind of suicidal ideation. While I’ve suffered from episodes of clinical depression in the past, this was something different. It was the dawning realization that my life was not just off course, it was not on any course whatsoever.
I had nothing to look forward to, I was emotionally invested in nothing, I was doing nothing. The entirety of my future was reduced to the idea that “when things get better, I’ll do fun stuff.”
I could not have told you what “better” looked like and I could not have explained what “fun stuff” meant. That had been true for a few years, honestly, but that morning in 2007 I finally saw the life I had made for myself, like watching the fog burn off only to see a fetid, endless swamp ahead of me: pointless, dreary, and monotonous.
I had studied and practiced Zen meditation for years, so I was very familiar with the concepts of mindfulness, impermanence, and the suffering of attachment. Knowing something, though, is not the same as being hit in the head with the depressing culmination of 38 years of only reacting to everything happening around and to me. While it is important to learn to go with the flow of life instead of against it, it is also important to understand that doing so does not equal giving up all autonomy or responsibility.
Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. ~ Gilda Radner
What I love about Gildna Radner’s quote, above, is the part where she says that you have to take the moment and make the best of it. I was used to not knowing what would happen next, but unfortunately I found out that it becomes easy to be uninvested in the outcome of something if you haven’t invested anything of yourself into it.
That mentality fit both my cynical GenX ennui and my trauma. You can’t get upset about things not working out your way if you never had “a way” you were going…if you were, like me, simple rolling off whatever cliffs happened to be nearby. The drawback to that kind of life is obvious, as I found out for myself on that morning in 2007. It had led me to a life where I felt like I had nothing worth living for. I was a casualty in my own life, always in a state of reacting to what was happening to me. Parents sick? Move back home to care for them! Lost a job? Find a new one as quickly as possible! Lonely? Get married to that guy you barely know! Sad? Go to the nightclub and dance (and drink, and maybe drink some more)!
There was no life plan to any of that. I sometimes had vague ideas of making a goal or two for my future, but again, they were circumstantial, such as planning to go into a specific career field because of a job I had lucked into. I was always barely clearing the bottom bar of potential because I tripped over it, not even fully aware that I was on an obstacle course.
Part of that was due to the home I was raised in, with two very mentally unstable parents who had been careening down the road to financial destitution and early deaths my whole life. In fact, my very existence was unplanned! My parents both thought they were infertile (father due to high-altitude flying and mother due to a botched illegal abortion when she was a teenager) and got married with the happy expectation of being childless forever. I was a surprise and very much unwanted until it became clear that I was going to be born no matter what. Yes, they loved me a lot, and I have never doubted that. But wanted me? Nope. I was a casualty in their lives as well, unexpected and unplanned.
So, back to that morning in fall of 2007 as I lay on a mattress that was falling apart while my apathetic husband got up and went about his day, going to a job he hated. I’m pretty sure I eventually got up too and went to work at a job I hated, along with all the other regular motions of living a pointless life, but something had changed deep inside of me. I did not know what would happen next in my life, but I realized that if I did not try to master myself — to take the moments I had left and make the best of them — then whatever happened would simply be more of the same drifting, pointless misery.
I’ll get into specifics in the next update, but for now, let me clear up one expectation you may have about this true-life origin story: I did not get up out of bed after that stunning realization and change my life in any way, shape, or form.
Yet.
This is the first part of my story, which I’m going to share in this newsletter over several updates. It’s not a full biography, don’t worry! But this chapter of my life has a definite starting point…