Envy & Paths to Contentment …

I’ve always envied people who knew, without any doubt, exactly what they wanted to be, the ones who had a dream and knew where they wanted life to take them.

At primary school, when asked that ages old question What do you want to be when you grow up? some children always had an immediate response, they wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, a nurse or a soldier, so on and so forth. No hesitation, for whatever reasons that was what they wanted.

How is that possible? How can anybody know at 6 or 7 what they want to do for the rest of their life? Yet some people do. They make their decision and never swerve; they simply find the path necessary to reaching their goal and follow it.

Two of my cousins are prime examples; one always knew he wanted to work with cars, for the other it was being a chef. I envied them and those other kids so badly, because when I was asked the same question I would always have to think about it, bite my lip and scrunch my serious, little forehead up in thought as I tried to decide what it was that I wanted to be most on that particular day. I didn’t have a path, I could have had a big, garish, yellow superhighway put in front of me, lined with a chorus of midgets singing “follow the yellow brick road” in annoying voices and I still wouldn’t have had a clue where I should be headed or what I wanted to find at the end of it.

It certainly wasn’t for lack of dreams, I’ve always been a hopeless dreamer and had a glut of them as a child, it was just that, unfortunately, I was a quitter too who got bored quickly.

For instance, I turned my back on the tiny ballet dancer who had once seen a ballet on television and had her fledgling imagination well and truly captured. Her world was small and simple; everything that was beautiful, glamorous and desirable was defined by the ability to dance on your toes, the graceful, expressive arch of an arm and the delicate shade of a tutu. She would fashion a floaty skirt out of her grandmother’s silken scarves, fidgeting as her hair was tied back into a tight, little bun and then go dipping and twirling around the room as ‘Clair de lune’ played over and over. But she had to go, because as I grew older prancing around in tights didn’t fit in with my tomboy ideals. Ballet was for sissies.

It was a little inevitable I suppose, growing up with three, older, male cousins. They teased me mercilessly but didn’t allow anybody else to, they let me be one of the boys, and I could tag along in their adventures, even though I couldn’t clamber over fences as nimbly or run as fast as they could. Many a day was rued when I managed to ruin a perfect escape by getting my dungarees caught on a bramble bush or by deciding that I was going to try and make friends with the two, extremely angry swans instead of running for my life. I knew my inclusion in this most exclusive of boys’ clubs was tenuous and I did everything I could to fit in and impress. If my eldest cousin, clearly a young God in the making, wanted to be a mechanic, then that’s what I wanted to be, too. Nothing sissy about being a mechanic. But those hourglass sands kept spilling and I soon realised that the only parts of a car I was really interested in were the stereo and the colour, plus I hated getting grease and oil under my nails, so that was that.

By time I went to grammar school I had grown out of my boyish ways, skirts, dresses and giggling were back in vogue and in rediscovering my girliness I had also discovered a desire to be an actress.

I had always enjoyed singing and dancing but I was shy and somewhat introverted. It had been suggested at a parents’ evening that being encouraged to participate in a few, more outgoing, activities might arm me with some much-needed social skills. I had been in school plays and concerts, (my inauspicious, yet apt, first role was that of a mouse in the nursery nativity) but only ever as part of a choir where I could sing my heart out and still remain largely anonymous to everyone but my family, sitting proudly in the audience. I was a dutiful child, still eager to please and win approval from adults, so I joined the drama club. The teachers were kind and encouraging and started me off with small, supporting roles, gently pushing me out of my comfort zone and into a place that was completely foreign but strangely exciting to me.

As hoped, I reached my teenage years with a new level of confidence; I was still basically introverted but not quite so painfully shy. I had become a veteran of the school stage, never the leading lady but always enthusiastic in my supporting roles. I’ve never really cared to analyse why I enjoyed it so much, or why I was able to overcome a natural shyness which remains with me to this day, I just did. Maybe I instinctively knew it was a fragile thing of shadow and mirage, and was worried that if I questioned it too deeply it would disintegrate at my touch like ancient manuscript.

Predictably, the budding actress was one of the first casualties in my teen rebellion when it came. When I first started to skip school I would always return for drama lessons, much to the irritation of my other teachers. Finally, in an effort to try to make me take my education seriously they banned me from all school trips and productions and said I could only participate if I stuck to all my lessons. My drama teacher, poor man, practically begged me to knuckle down, he genuinely thought I had a talent and had dreams of sending me to the National Youth Theatre that summer, knowing it could never happen unless I showed a willingness to conform. I was flattered and genuinely touched by his faith in me and promised to do my very best. But I let him down and proved that his faith was misguided. I happened to see a documentary one night about one of the big London productions, for Bugsy Malone or Oliver! I can’t remember which, I just remember being repulsed by all these precocious children, oozing confidence and playing their parts with what seemed to me a distasteful amount of energy and enthusiasm. I had never seen parts being performed that way, I had certainly never performed that way myself and just like that I lost interest in acting. I dropped out of school with a vengeance, too far gone in my petty insurgence; with no interests to anchor me any longer I simply drifted away on a tide of youthful hopelessness.

After that I didn’t really have any dreams, I was in too much of a hurry to grow up to think about what I wanted to do when I got there. Life just happened and I unthinkingly went along with it. I found jobs, gained qualifications, found slightly better jobs, left home and got found by a number of boyfriends who for the most part I wish I’d remained hidden from. But I still had no plans, no big goals in life and I still envied those people who knew what I didn’t. I was adrift and just kept drifting.

But now I’m 30 and the years are starting to blur and seem shorter and I know it’s only going to get worse. I’ve rudely had my own mortality shoved in my face like a broken mirror and been forced to take a long, hard look at myself, my life and all their distortions. It seems that I am no closer to knowing what it is I want my destiny to be, and that in a lot of ways I am still that little girl dressed in a mouse costume her mother made.

It’s about time I had a path. It doesn’t have to be anything grand or fancy, it doesn’t have to be yellow and lined with musical midgets, it just has to be mine. I don’t expect to be a high-flyer, I know some paths only lead as far as the local supermarket, to parenthood or to simply being the love of somebody’s life, it doesn’t matter which it is as long as it leads to knowing you have a purpose and brings you contentment at the end of it.

So what do I want? That’s the big question.

Bad experience and self-awareness has resulted in my giving up on men and the prospect of ever having a satisfying relationship, which in turn has taken away the hope of having children. I’d really like to travel but that remains dependent on my gaining a much more secure financial footing than I currently enjoy and in order to gain that I need to have a career. One dream is to find a job that I’m good at and that I honestly enjoy, that isn’t just a soulless method of paying bills that I tolerate but secretly resent. I don’t know what that could possibly be or how I can even go about finding out, because I wasn’t one of those kids then and I’m certainly not one of them now. Whenever I discuss this with anybody they invariably ask, Well what do you enjoy doing? This is always followed by an uncomfortable pause and then my guilty confession that I don’t really enjoy doing anything, nothing that I can make a career out of anyway. I like books and Scrabble, music, spending time with my friends, shopping and sitting in the sun, all lovely things but hardly an occupation, unless you’re in a relationship with a premier league footballer, which isn’t an option as far as I’m concerned. So it’s a very grey area and I haven’t figured out the answer yet, it’s something I’m going to have to give more thought to.

The one thing I do know I want is to be a better writer. I know this because of the way I feel when I read other people’s blogs. Envy, thy name is Girl Interrupted.

I read a lot of posts, more than most people probably think, but the fact is that the early hours of the morning often find me drifting unseen through the blogosphere, a wispy spectre of blog-posts past, present and future. Sometimes I leave a comment to mark my passing, more often I don’t because witty, clever words just don’t come easy at 3am and as far as commenting goes my philosophy is much like Mark Twain’s, that it is more prudent to keep one’s mouth closed and be thought a fool than open it and remove all doubt.

Sometimes I don’t comment because somebody’s words have simply blown me away, because a post is just so well crafted, so cleverly written and achingly beautiful that I choke on my envy and leave feeling a little intimidated and rather hopeless. Hopeless and intimidated because suddenly I realise that there is a world of difference between a blogger who writes and a writer who blogs*, and that whilst I might be the former I would much prefer to be the latter.

If one thing has remained constant through all my childish fads and whims it is writing. I gave up on other things, unmourned, when they became too challenging or when they no longer fitted in with the image I wanted others to have of me or to have of myself; but I have always loved writing, right from the first time I painstakingly and ungrammatically related what I’d done in my summer holidays, writing in bold, shaky capitals, gripping my pencil tight in my tiny fist, intent on getting the stunted sentences out, and I have returned to it time and again for comfort and pleasure. I like to think that I have some skill in writing but I also know that I could do much better and suddenly that seems to have become rather important to me, because I can’t vocalise my thoughts and feelings very well now but the words pour out of my fingertips regardless of the weakness of my vocal chords.

For years, if anybody has asked me what my dream job is I have said writing and illustrating children’s books, but I have never seen it as a realistic or attainable dream, and therefore unqualified as an answer to What do you want to be when you grow up? I still don’t anticipate being the next J K Rowling or Margaret Atwood, that’s not what this is about, I just don’t want to feel envious of those beautiful posts that linger in my mind and keep me awake with wishing I could write more than the silly, fluffy stuff that my public writing seems to have evolved into. With a bit of effort being a better writer, even if only within the confines of a blog, is something I can realistically achieve. That’s my path for now. It may not be the main path, maybe it’s no more than a small track worn thin and made visible by bigger, more talented feet than mine, but it’s a path I want to follow and find whatever waits at the end of it. I think it could be contentment.

So, envy can be a terrible thing, it can lead to a life of bitter resentfulness that never allows us to fully experience happiness and robs us of the ability to recognise and appreciate all the good things in life. But it can also be inspiring, it can make us dream and question our own abilities, it can be the deciding factor that gives us that little shove, just when we need it the most.

* Credit goes to Mr London Street for this aptly-worded piece of wisdom, and for being a general source of inspiration, along with OtherWordlyOne and Hannah Miet, amongst others – thank you all.