The Three Business Suits of Eve

I’m obviously not done exploring the whys and wherefores of my seemingly disjointed professional history. But today, kids, we get to learn what I’m going to do about fixing this whole mess of a life I sent to the landfill in the Herbie Curbie. The picture? Me as a high school teacher and cheerleading coach. Can't believe I left that one off my post yesterday.

I’ve been in a bitter mood all summer. Bitter, nihilistic, hard-bitten, overwhelmed, stretched. You get the picture. I make a great small-business-woman for about six months before I get really peeved that I can’t write because I’m hitting deadlines left and right and pleasing my clients to no end. And, no, I’m not in the skin trade. I please my clients by being a strategic thinker and delivering more than I promise. Which makes me bitter, yada yada. Writing manuals is grinding work. In the end I often know more about my client’s business than they do. Perfect for my tendency to be a know-it-all to begin with.

I read this great article about Johnny Depp at the gym today (hang for a second, you know I’ll bring this point back around home in some crazy way). The article focused on how he manages to detangle himself from his rather deep character portrayals. The answer?

154 foot yacht and a private island.

So, I’m not getting my own private island any time soon. But I can imagine how great it would be to go to the island and just SHED the worry about why one client does not have good exhaust system guidelines and why another refuses to explain the Day Dot system to their franchisees. I could escape the worry I feel when I just know they are missing critical things like how to operate their Ansul System. I could drop out of society and not be there to take the phone call from the client who is still using operational guidelines from five years ago and has to call fired employees to find the originals of their kitchen recipes.

You can see why I’m bitter, right? So, here’s what happens when you inhabit your client's skin and succeed at becoming a successful small business person. You gain 10 pounds in three months.

Which is actually about 1/3 of the weight of the detritus I threw away when I cleaned out the studio. I’d have liked to chuck my big fat ass in that bin.

So, I’m not happy when I’m not writing and I’m fat, even if I am being successful at whatever crazy thing I am putting my hand to this year and I have jeans I like.

That’s my elevator speech.

My problem is that I succeed in whatever I can do, no matter how ill-suited to my own hopes, dreams and talents because I throw my whole entire self into it. I’m Johnny Depp. (as an aside, my Myers-Briggs test on Facebook actually listed me as an ENFJ – and guess what Johnny Depp is! Yup. We’re twins. Except only one of us has a yacht. And an island.)

Here’s where I tie this all in. I have to find a way to be more me and less the me of the moment and the me of the making a buck. In order to do this I have to do the following: Lose the weight I’ve been letting hide the real me, let some of my damn poetry see the light of day, write my own work (which does not have anything to do with the 100 degrees of doom, Day Dots, or spreadsheets detailing labor costs of any kind).

I’m going to admit this at the end because the only people still reading are my friends and hopefully love me. I’m on Nutrisystem. There, I said it. Finished my first week. Lost the first two of 48 pounds. So, I’m going to blog about that. And I’m going to start putting a poem up every Monday. Because if even one person reads my words, even if it’s someone who knows and loves me, well, that makes me a writer now doesn’t it. It makes me ME.