Four Things You Should (Probably) Know.

Is there anything more painfully, self-congratulatory than those annoying lists – ’20 Things I Wish I Knew in My 20’s’ or ’40 Things I learnt by the time I turned 40′.  A small to medium part of me simply does-not-actually-care what they learnt or wish they knew and the rest of me honestly doesn’t have that-much-time on my hands. So, sod twenty, thirty or even forty things you should probably know. Here are Four.

There are No Grown Ups. I am 44 years old, have a job, a husband and 2 kids. From the outside looking in, it could potentially seem like I have my shit together. Not really – I am just making it up as I go along like the rest of you. Just because I am doing grown up things – like taking conference calls or going to the dentist – does not in any way support the idea that I feel like I am a bona fide adult. There is some comfort to be found in this – because as soon as you realise that all of us are just basically winging it – the better you might feel about your own doubts and insecurities. See also Imposter Syndrome for further proof that despite the veneer of calm proficiency most of us are just improvising our lives in a mad panic.

‘The One’ is a Lie. I am sorry to piss all over your romanticism, but your soul mate is not just out there, hanging around in the universe, waiting for you to complete them. I get it – it’s a nice idea – but it’s also a bit of a moral cop out because commitment doesn’t mean as much if fate is doing all the heavy lifting. Soul Mates are not just born. They are made, over time and with a fair amount of work and a certain degree of mutual deception. In fact, ‘the one’ we end up with is often a distant-cousin-twice-removed from ‘the one’ we started out with. Dan Savage, author and media pundit, calls this “paying the price of admission”. “There is no settling down without some settling for. There is no long-term relationship that is not just about putting up with your partner’s flaws, but accepting them and pretending they aren’t there.” Yup – nobody’s perfect (least of all us) so let’s agree to accept, or better yet ignore, each other’s weirdness. If you want to ride this attraction that’s the “price of admission”. A lot of people’s fear of commitment stems from their fear that people will get to see them in all their technicolour odd-ness and reject them. It’s why my first piece of advice on How to Stay Married is not to focus so much on the shiny, happy love stuff but to choose the person who annoys you the least. Happy Ever After with fewer nails down the blackboard as it were.

We are All Addicts. Truth be told, most of us is hiding behind an addiction to something. It might be something smelly and obvious like fags, booze or gambling yourself into a frenzy. Or maybe your addiction is something more socially acceptable, like always being busy or working too damn hard. Some of you will be constantly obsessing over what you do and do not eat and how often and hard you work out. For others, it might be the constant pull of technology and the hours wasted scrolling your life away looking at other people’s bodies, holidays and cleverly crafted flat lays. Most of us need something to distract us from ourselves or to give us the semblance of control. Addicts from the former spectrum (booze/fags/drugs) who give up can usually be found channelling said addiction furiously into another space. My ex-addict friends are the most aggressively devoted health fiends I know. They will take their high wherever they can get it – endorphin me up baby! – Make mine a triple shot almond latte with a side of spin. Life can often feel like just one long exercise in self-restraint – trying not to eat, drink, smoke, snort or shag anything we are not meant to.  If we are lucky we can walk the delicate line between having fun and not dying too quickly. Like Woody Allen said, ‘You can live to a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to a hundred.’ Quite.

Getting Older is (Mostly) Just A Lesson in Irony.

• Getting older means not taking everything so personally. Just as you start to care way less about what people think about you, people probably start to think about you way less.
• With maturity comes distance and distance allows perspective. You start to see life clearer, right around the time you start to need glasses to read every-bloody-thing.
• It takes most of us years to understand what fuel our body needs and to learn to love and accept our bodies. This usually happens right around the time no one is interested in seeing you naked anymore.
• With age comes wisdom. By the time you have all-the-answers no one is really interested in listening to an old bag like you. Which is just as well, ‘cause you can barely hear a damn thing they are saying anyway.

This GET SMARTER Post is brought to you by someone who is old enough to know better but young enough not to give a shit.

     Photo Credit – Craig Sunter ‘FoUr’ – Under Creative Commons Licence