Besides being the only snappy title I could come up with after wracking my brain for however long my limited attention span would allow, The Relentless Pursuit of Fabulous is my shiny, new mission statement for life; one that I’m trying to put into action every day from now on.
It’s supposed to remind me of who I am—a relentless pursuer of goals. When I was a kid, I drove my parents crazy with whatever it was I had my mind set on. Be it my all-consuming desire for a Cabbage Patch doll (mine was named Arianna Kelly) or that I considered eavesdropping on my mom’s phone conversations as training to become a spy at age 9, I’ve seldom lacked drive. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I really can’t blame them for giving me the nickname Persistence Precocious before I hit junior high (PP for short…god, my family is shameless). I’m not like some gifted over-achiever or anything, but if I set my mind on something, I have a tendency to chase it with ferocity typically reserved for pit bulls and mountain lions…even if it’s no good for me (exhibit A: my love life 1991-2003).
Lately it’s been hard to remember that part of me; the person capable of being focused who didn’t let things stand in her way. Lately, I’ve been unfocused, confused, and unmotivated. I don’t know what the hell changed things, and well, I guess it doesn’t really matter what did it. What does matter is leaving it behind me as quickly as possible and getting back to that person I know must be in there somewhere. This has been going on for way too long now.
I keep thinking back to times in my life when I didn’t hesitate before trying something new, like in the 8th grade when I tried out for volleyball. It was the first time I’d tried out for anything (for good reason I might add, girls who trip over imaginary objects seldom get much farther along than walking and talking simultaneously). Still, I practiced my serve in our backyard until my arm nearly fell out of the socket, hoping against all odds that I’d break the habit of serving into the net when it came time for the big day of try-outs.
Now at most schools if you weren’t good enough to play on the team, they’d just cut you and call it a character-building experience. My junior high on the other hand was caught up in this whole “getting cut during try-outs hurts a kid’s self-esteem” idea so they had a “B team”. I blame the release of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” a couple years prior. I think it made school administrators fear a grunge-inspired uprising of the disenfranchised youth.
The B-team amounted to a collective of hopeful, if not slightly embittered teenage girls painfully aware that they weren’t good enough for the A-team. We were like the pre-Iraq Army Reservists of junior varsity volleyball with raging hormones and bad skin. Still, we practiced day after day wishing that maybe one of the girls on the A-team would get injured or sick so that we might have a shot at seeing some action on the front lines. We never got to play against any other schools because all the other schools were still on “the devastation of getting cut from the team isn’t as bad as teen pregnancy” bandwagon. They only had one team, the A-team.
I knew I wasn’t tall enough and couldn’t jump high enough to ever be able to spike the ball and I’d probably never play in an A-team game, but I kept going to practice anyway. God, I hated explaining to my parents and friends why I always had to attend practice, but never had any games for them to attend. Such was the marginalized life of a B-team player.
Then one day my dad came back from a business trip and brought me a home a gift. It was a pretty rare thing to get something I knew my dad picked out; my mom has been the reigning Executive Director of Gift Acquisitions in our family for as long as I can remember. It was a volleyball t-shirt that said on the back, “I’m like time, I can’t be stopped.” My dad smiled when he gave it to me and said, “Well, it’s true!” My dad is a pretty soft-spoken guy, so when he does say something, I usually listen. At age 14, it was the best compliment I’d ever gotten up until that point. Wearing that shirt made me feel like I could take on the world, even if I wasn’t playing on the A-team. And knowing my dad got it just for me was the best. I thought about that shirt on Father’s Day yesterday. It made me think of how lucky I am to have a dad like him.
So where did that girl who couldn’t be stopped go? Is she still in there somewhere or has the last 15 years swallowed her whole? I wonder if my dad still sees her in me somewhere. I hope so, but I can’t bear to ask. He’s told me that he’s “had concerns about me lately”.
That brings me to the second half of my blog title: fabulous. I have this vague picture in my head of what fabulous is:
*a clearer direction for my career
*a healthier, more fit lifestyle
*greener habits
*less debt
*a more active social life
*plenty of creative endeavors
In addition to all that, there’s this indefinable thing that I can’t put into words adequately enough to add it to the list; a sense of fulfillment, of satisfaction that my life has meaning and depth and that even if I got hit by a truck tomorrow, I would have accomplished at least something and made the world a little better somehow. I don’t know what to call it—mojo? Whatever it is, I’ve misplaced it.
Step one: figure out what daily habits have to be changed to get the ball rolling on this fabulous revolution.
Maybe it is in a crappy Honda Civic instead of a kick ass van and maybe I don’t have a theme song just yet, but I am fully committed to my relentless pursuit of fabulous…even if it is on the B-team.
