Yes to the Dress

I'm taking a study break.... cause cash disbursements journals are not exactly the most riveting of reading materials.

Earlier this week I was having a chat with one of our interns.  She's engaged to be married but has kept pushing the date back for her wedding in order to lose weight.  She was considering bariatric surgery at one point....which was absolutely frightening.  I understand her concerns, I do... but trying to lose over 100 pounds because you think that you need to in order to look nice in a wedding dress is NOT enough of a reason to do that to yourself.  Besides, she has a good man who loves her now, and how she looks now.  During this conversation she also mentioned that she was petrified to go wedding dress shopping.  She was afraid that nothing would fit, or if it did she would look like a giant puff-ball.  She was worried about the looks that she would get in the bridal shop.  She and her fiance have the entire wedding planned and paid for, the only thing left is her and the dress.  As we are the same size, I offered to bring in my old wedding dress the next day for her to try on.

When she put it on, it fit perfectly.  It zipped right up.  The two of us are the same height so that she doesn't even need to get the dress tailored.  It was as if the dress was made for her.  This is a picture of her in the dress.  The smile on her face is genuine...it is the look of someone who was realizing that all of this wedding stuff was possible for her and that she can look absolutely stunning.  It was a beautiful moment, and needless to say, the dress is now hers.  And I gotta say, for sitting in a closet for 9 years, the dress is in amazing shape.

I'm glad that she now has it.  It feels like a purge for me....like the dress will finally get the happy marriage that it was originally designed to usher in.  But like all purges, I have mixed emotions.... the strongest however is absolute relief...twinged with a little regret. 

In all this purging however, I'm considering another purge of sorts.  I've been urged by many, and its been a running project for a very long time, to write about the Mr.3 saga and put it into book form.  In the back of my head it is this undone task nagging at me.... and I'll have good days, start working on editing and all of that, and then get triggered and actively avoid writing anything for weeks/months.  So in this spirit of purging, what if I purge that idea as well? 

What if I say no?

Its an intriguing and freeing idea.

At the moment I am leading a full AND fulfilling life.  There is this amazing forward momentum happening now....yes, even with my frustration at double-entry accounting. 

I can write a memoir when I retire....cause right now, I'm working to get to that point. 
Living is pretty awesome.

Now.... back to figuring out how to make a trial balance worksheet by hand....

Stupid Little Life Lessons

I am my own worst critic.
And I am not exactly sure if anyone really believes me when I say that because I try to hide my feelings of inadequacy.
They are failings after all.
And my failings should be secret, locked away in a little chest buried deep, deep, deep underground guarded by mythical creatures.

Its Ramadan again, and I can't be sure if my latest upheaval is due to the internal focus that the season invites, or if what is going on in my life is just difficult.  I've lost all perspective. There is definitely an epic battle going on between me and my ego.

Battle of the intellect: I decided to go back to school so that I can sit for my CPA exam.  It is part of my multi-year plan to get myself to the place where I only need to have one full-time job instead of two.  I started last month in the accounting program at Western Governor's University.  I was hoping just to be able to go into the masters of accounting program, but I need to have an accounting bachelors first.  I'm glad that WGU is competency-based, because it means that I can progress through the degree program at an elevated pace.  And thank god it is all online, because not only would scheduling classes into my current obligations be near to impossible, but also....  I think that I would be a nightmare in a classroom setting.  I've reached that point where you've acquired so many pieces of expensive paper that you really feel like people should honor and respect how smart you are.  Feeling entitled is incredibly obnoxious.  So far I've managed to clear out a class a week in my degree plan, which is excellent.  I would like to finish the bachelors in one six month term, which would mean continuing at my current pace....a pace that I'm not sure that I can keep up.  This acknowledgement of my limitations infuriates me to no end.  I submitted my business ethics assignment and they wanted me to revise. I did, but submitting it through the online forum doesn't really satisfy my need to want to slam the paperwork on someone's desk and shout "Here! Are you happy now!?"  I took a pre-test for the intro to accounting class and didn't pass. So I read through the materials, re-took the pre-test and got the same damn score.  I think I keep getting my debits and credits mixed up, because for some reason we have to do double line accounting.... this also makes me want to scream at people. 

I know that the lesson here is that one is always a student, being challenged is good.... but I am psychologically back in that place when during my masters I burst into tears of frustration in my master's program adviser's office.  She had no tissues in her office and just looked at me like I had grown a third head.  She offered no sympathy, just told me that I needed to try harder.
Yeah, I get the message....I still get to be annoyed by it though.

Battle of the harsh-judgy-ness:  I've felt a little ganged-up on at work the past week or so.  I feel like my feelings about these interactions with several members of staff are justified.  The hard part for me is that I haven't been able to let these feelings of being hurt go.  Nor have I been able to let go of the hurt by something my brother said to me carelessly in June.  I really do have a difficult time holding onto grudges and anger.... its exhausting.  I also recently called someone graceless.  They had posted a video of a performance that they did, and I couldn't look at the performance from a place of "hey that's awesome that they were willing to go on stage like that"....  instead I viewed it as "they have no grace, no class, and are trying too hard to look empowered when I suspect that it is all fake".  To make matters worse, I told a couple students about how graceless I thought this person was.  In my role as a teacher I should never have done that.  In my role as a feminist, I shouldn't have put another woman down like that.  In my role as being my true self, I shouldn't have viewed her performance from a place of judgement stemming from some complicated unwarranted competitive-thing I feel with this person.
I've turned into Judgy McJudgerson, and its been haunting me for over a week.  Sadly.... I have more examples than this from the past couple of weeks.  All I feel is shame, and hurt, and tiredness..... and like my head is going to explode.

Battle of perfection: So lets add all of the above and combine it with my regular sense of never being to do enough, act enough, achieve enough... my desire to be perfect in anything that I put my mind to, but trying to hide the fact that I am barely just getting by in everything I'm attempting.  A dear friend of mine looked at my star-chart, a language I really don't fully comprehend yet, and told me that he was surprised at how ambitious my chart says I am.  I'm not surprised....but that's because I live in my own head.  And with my sense of trying to be perfect, I still am and will always be shocked when people tell me how laid-back I seem.  Under normal conditions, I can forgive anyone's mistakes, shortcomings, general humanness..... anyone's that is, except my own.

I wish that I could end this blog post with an upbeat "I'm working on it and am confident that I can overcome all of this".   I can't.  I can only hope that I finish the grant report I'm working in a timely manner and that the pain meds I just took for my headache will kick in soon.

Oh and that I won't suddenly lose it on someone with or without cause.