I have been in a very quiet, contemplative place lately, watching as some new energy percolates and rises to the surface, and I am now in a place where I am ready to declare independence for myself. I am declaring independence from the belief that I have to make my life match up to anyone else’s definitions of success for my life, as well as from all the places in my mind telling me that my life should somehow be in any way different from the way it is right now.

About six years ago I decided to leave the work-a-day world and go into business for myself. I’ve spent a large portion of those years with different classes, workshops, books, seminars, and programs designed for entrepreneurs. It’s all great information, especially since I was on a pretty steep learning curve. But I’ve reached the point now where those products are actually keeping me out of my life.

I realized that what I genuinely desire, and what the people who produce those products desire, are not the same thing. And I’ve been making myself wrong and feeling guilty for wanting what I truly want, and not wanting what they say I should want. Let me explain.

After six years of trying out a lot of different possibilities, I realized that my goal in life is not to be a worker/earner. If I had to give a name to my “reason for being”, I would say that I am a spiritual contemplative/mystic/writer/professional dreamer. So I like working about 10-12 hours a week, with lots of time left to create a nurturing home, take care of the errands of daily life, maintain my connections with other people, think, observe, process life, and create.

I like that the way I contribute to and help change the world is through working on myself, and transforming my connections to the people around me, one encounter at a time.

Unfortunately, even in the personal growth/New Thought community, that business model is never really presented as a viable option. It seems to me that whenever people are talking about things like The Secret, and The Law Of Attraction, and other principles of Deliberate Creation, the emphasis is always on BIGGER, and MORE. If the concept of “enough” is ever addressed, it only seems to be in the manner of finding a way to temporarily let what you have be “enough”, only so it can move you to a different place where you can finally get MORE. There doesn’t seem to be much work addressing the question of genuinely being satisfied and feeling like you have enough.

And that is where I started to feel disconnected from the popular concept of personal growth, because I could no longer ignore the fact that I am really satisfied with my life right now.

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Last night my husband and I were watching the Mythbusters test the myth that diving underwater will protect you if someone is shooting at you.

As they were explaining the rig they were going to build that would allow them to shoot some ENORMOUS guns into water in the middle of Jamie’s shop, my husband paused the show (and let us all hail the awesomeness that is TIVO!) to share his thoughts on the matter.

My husband: You know, I bet they could just calculate that. They know what kind of drag the bullet has…

Me (interrupting, because I was kind of being bitchy last night): Dude, nobody wants to watch people just sitting around doing equations. People don’t tune in to see Mathbusters!

Remember that wonderful commercial from the 80’s?

Remember how we would mock the poor, helpless woman on the floor?

Remember how we become that which we mock? No? Yeah, me neither, until yesterday when I became that woman.

Ten minutes before I was supposed to get on the phone for an important interview regarding the next creative project I’m planning to take on I stood up, my entire lower back seized up, and I was on the kitchen floor. And I couldn’t get up.

I had to crawl on my hands and knees over to the phone to call my husband at work and tell him that, yeah, basically, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

I had to lie on the kitchen floor to put on my pants. My husband had to put my shoes on for me.

But those of you who know me will not be at all surprised to know that I delayed my husband’s homecoming and my doctor’s appointment in order to give myself enough time to complete my phone interview, because DAMMIT, I AM GONNA ACE THIS THING!

The interview did go really well, and I passed with flying colors. Apparently the extra added challenge of having to find a way to support my own body weight that involved neither sitting nor standing for 30 minutes just gave me the extra oomph! I needed to sail right through.

But it is times like these that makes me wonder how I was ever allowed to be the one in charge of, say, a plant, much less my very own, alleged, grown-up self.

(For those of you who’ve been following my saga with the imaginary snakes.)

Last week I tried to explain to one of our friends, who also has his pilot’s license, why I just was not OK with him taking my husband up for a ride in his plane:

“It has nothing to do with you (and it really doesn’t). It’s just that deep down in my heart, I truly don’t believe that planes should be able to fly. It really feels like that violates all the laws of nature. I think that the only reason it’s worked so far is that we’re all under some kind of magical spell. And it’s only a matter of time before the spell ends, and all the planes in the world come crashing down.”

After many years of therapy, and medication, and working on myself, my support team and I have together come to the conclusion that this may be the time when I can gradually begin to get off of my anti-depressants. Yay! So yesterday I had the following conversation with my coach as we worked out a plan to support me during this time.

We discussed the various symptoms I’ve noticed before when changing medications or doses, and came up with a list of things to watch for.

My coach: So on a scale of 1-10, how intense do these symptoms have to get before you either call me or your doctor to get some help with them?

Me: ……..

Me: Um, usually I just wait them out and endure through them until they’re over.

My coach: I know! But we’re not doing it that way this time. That’s the whole point of this scale. This time we’re going to do it gently and easily, so gently as a matter of fact that you might not even notice a damn thing!

Me: Oh.

Me: I can do that?

Today I was reading one of my favorite bloggers, Mighty Maggie, and it just struck me that there are so many similarities between us, we could really almost be Twins Separated At Birth.

1. She is a creative person

2. Married to a techno-geek

3. Is DEEPLY passionate about the correct use of grammar and punctuation

4. Feels that their Roomba is their pet. (I strongly feel that our TIVO is the 6th member of our family, and will frequently give my husband updates on its behavior when he gets home from work, especially if I feel he needs to discipline it. As in, “Dude, I think you need to have some words with the TIVO because it was really giving me some LIP today.”

5. And she does NOT like to talk on the phone. She is currently trying to hire someone to fill her position before she goes on maternity leave, and describes it like this: “But there is a reason I posted the job online and only left my EMAIL ADDRESS. There is nothing in the ad implying that they should google my company until they find our phone number, call me up and interrupt my very important blog reading schedule to ask me stupid annoying questions about “what I’m looking for”. Send me a resume like everyone else! GOD! I swear, if these people knew me, they’d know they’ve automatically lost any chance they have just by trying to get me to talk on the phone.”

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By the time weeks 3 and 4 of our comedy class rolled around, it was time to get down to work. I’d written and performed about 2 or 3 original jokes by this time, and even if I did not have my classmates rolling on the floor with laughter, I’d realized that it was highly unlikely that I’d actually contract Death By Sucking.

This was hard work. Especially on the days when I’d written what I believed to be the most brilliant piece of comedy ever known to man and the teacher responded with comments like, “That’s the third time I’ve seen that joke and I still don’t get it.”

It was especially hard for me because I so Want To Be Right. And I believe that I am right, and that if I just will it hard enough I can convince the world that I Am Right and They Are Wrong. That my work is funny, and they should be laughing at it. (I’m sure you can imagine how well that worked.)

I finally realized that I had a choice here. I could be “right” and miserable, or I could be willing to be wrong, willing to learn what actually works in comedy, and learn how to write jokes that actually would make people laugh. But I really had to think about this before I could decide. Like, for months.

But I finally decided to swallow my pride (Important Side Note: Pride? Does not taste good, even washed down with regular Coke) and admit that I was going to have to be bad at this for a while before I could learn how to be good. And, I was. And, it sucked. And, I did not die.

And then, one day, a miracle occurred. I wrote a joke, and lo, it was funny, and the class, they did laugh. And it was very good.

Especially since the teacher is just as much of a smart ass as all of us, and every time we grudgingly came around to doing things his way he’d say things like, “Hm, it’s almost as if I know what I’m talking about.”

So I’m off now to the Dress Rehearsal. If I can still form a coherent thought when I get back, I’ll let you know how it goes.

The week before I had to perform my very first original joke could be summed up in this way: Extended Nervous Breakdown Accompanied By Painful And Prolonged Migraines.

This was the scariest thing I’d had to do since I had to take my 3-hour oral exam/thesis defense for my Master’s Degree, discussing abstract, graduate-level literature and linguistic concepts in an entirely foreign language. But at least for that I had 4 years of college and 2 years of graduate school backing me up. Whereas with the comedy performance I was pretty much on my own.

And let me tell you something. When you are standing so far out of your comfort zone that it’s not even a blip on the radar, feeling as though you’re about to dive headfirst into the Grand Canyon Of Suckiness with nothing to break your fall, Believing In Yourself and Focusing On The Positive can just go ahead and suck it.

The problem was that I knew what was coming. While I have gotten pretty good at writing humor that people read, I had finally been forced to admit that truly, I did not have the first friggin’ clue as to how to write a joke that was funny when it was spoken. I’d been made painfully aware of this fact by the numerous times that my carefully crafted written jokes landed with all the grace of the Hindenburg plummeting to its fiery doom when I attempted to transfer them into a “humorous” Toastmaster’s speech.

So I was pretty sure that this class was going to be like the military, in that we and all of our old notions about humor would be broken down, in order to be reformed into something shiny and new. (I mean, I sort of assume that’s what they do in the military-I don’t have any personal experience in that area. I’m such a wuss that the only military that would ever take me in would be “The Army Of People You Send In When You WANT To Be Conquered”.)

And I was right. Since everyone was still pretty much operating out of defensive mode, and since we’d received no actual instruction in joke writing at this point, most people tried to go for the “clever”, easy laugh-sight gags, puns, references to sex. (I played it safe by poking fun at my big, bushy hair.)

And after each of us had performed we had to remain standing in front of the class while he critiqued us what (if anything) worked, and what did not. And so the break(ing) down began.

I think for me, the most interesting thing about taking this stand-up comedy class, besides the process of learning how to write spoken humor that will actually make people laugh, has been all of the personality “buttons” that this experience has pushed in me.

And so, being who I am, I decided that it wasn’t enough that I had to-in just 6 weeks-learn how to get up in front of 281 people and deliver a 4-minute, funny, stand-up comedy routine. I decided that this would also be The Perfect Time to take apart various pieces of my psyche, mess around with them for a while, and then attempt to put all the pieces of my mind back together again. Because really-who wouldn‘t?

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Yesterday I taught a Spanish class in which one of the students happens to be my husband. We were doing a sentence completion exercise, and one of the other students asked me how to say “space travel”.

“Well ’space’ is ‘espacio’,” I began.

“That sounds like a word you just made up,” interjected my husband (who, I feel compelled to point out, has attended all of six Spanish classes in his life as opposed to my ::cough::Master’s Degree in Spanish::cough), as he reached for his Spanish-English dictionary.

“So, what does the dictionary say,” I asked, with just a wee bit of testiness in my voice.

“Espacio,” he replied.

“Oh really? It says exactly what I just told you two seconds ago?” I taunted, feeling the sweet wave of vindication rush through me.

“Wow,” interjected one of the other students. “I’d love to see what arguments are like in the Ryan household.”

“Well, we have had to pull out the Almanac occasionally,” I said, in the tone of one who has just admitted to Bringing Out The Big Guns.

“I bet they Google everything and then one of them is like, ‘Hah, I can type faster than you so I win’,” continued the student, officially destroying for me any remaining vestiges of pride and vindication.

Ooh, man-the truth? Really does hurt.