Wanting What I Have

I think I have finally come to a place in my life where I want what I have. I wrote that a couple of months ago in a little notebook that was lying around in my kitchen. A few days later I saw how laughable it was. I can’t find the notebook now and I can’t find the feeling inside myself either. I no longer want what I have in my life, at least not right now. I’ll probably find the notebook and I hope I find the feeling too. Maybe the feeling will last longer the next time around. Maybe it will even be permanent, although, let’s face it, it probably won’t.

I’m realizing that feelings are like lights; they go on and off. When they’re on they make everything in the room look one way, and when they’re off they make everything look another way. Except that, unlike lights, you can’t turn them on and off at will. At least I can’t. I wish I could. I sort of feel like I should be able to, I feel like maybe other people can. But I can’t seem to change my feelings just because I want to.

Here’s a moment in recent memory when my I-don’t-want-what-I-have light came on very powerfully. I was sitting in a restaurant with my partner and two friends, a couple. Michael and I had just been talking about our upcoming vacation in Wisconsin, how easy and restful it was going to be, and how much we were looking forward to it. The conversation moved on to when the four of us might get together again, and my friends said that if we were going to do it soon it had to happen before a certain date.

“Why?” I said, and they told me they were leaving for Spain then. It turned out they were going to walk the El Camino. They were going to be gone for a month. And that was when my feeling light changed from green to red, and suddenly I saw my whole life in a different way. I no longer wanted what I had in my life. I wanted what they had in their lives.

Wisconsin sky

Source: Mary Allen

I still had the feeling the following morning. The I-don’t-want-what-I-have. The I-am-a-loser-because-I’m-going-to-Wisconsin-for-a-week-instead-of-to-Spain-for-a pilgrimage-to-a-holy-site-for-a-month feeling. The feeling turned off briefly when I was meditating and also when I talked about it with a friend. But then it came back on. I tried to shake it, but it was amazingly persistent.

In the morning before we left for our trip to Wisconsin, my I-want-what-I have light was back on. I looked around my house and loved what I saw: the paint color on the walls, the arched doorways, the way everything in the house reflected my sense of style.

Loving my house is a relatively new thing for me. I’ve owned this house as a single woman since 1995, and it’s taken me almost that long to even like it—i.e., to want what I had. Most of the time I only saw what was wrong with my house: no garage, only one bathroom, unfinished basement, et cetera. I’ve always been aware that I was projecting what I felt about myself onto the house, but knowing that didn’t change the feeling.

I’ve worked hard on improving my self-esteem over the years, and how I feel about the house has slowly and gradually gotten more positive. Which is no doubt why I was able to write that sentence in the little notebook in my kitchen and honestly feel what it said; why, when I looked around my house before we left for the Wisconsin vacation, I loved my house, I wanted what I had in my life. Of course, I was about to leave it for a little while, and there’s nothing like leaving home to make you love your home. To make you wish you were staying in your home.

On the vacation in a cabin by a lake in Wisconsin, I struggled mightily to want what I had, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that we could have been doing something better. The cabin was tiny and cramped as well as vaguely smelly and grubby. You couldn’t swim in our part of the lake because of algae, and the towels smelled slightly sour when you wiped your face on them.

But the setting was quiet and peaceful, there was a nice breeze coming off the lake, and the cabin was surrounded by trees. It was a nice enough vacation. I have to admit it was probably my I-want-something-other-than-what-I-have feeling light, which had been activated by my friends walking the El Camino—in my mind a romantic and adventurous thing to do—that was causing the problem.

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Since then I’ve mostly been too busy to focus on feeling one way or the other. But recently I’ve had some experiences—being around some very successful authors, facing rejection as I approach trying to publish a book—that have once again turned on the I’m-not good-enough, my-life-isn’t good-enough-because-I-don’t-have-what-they-have feeling lights. Those lights can make the house of my life look really, really awful.

As my friend who’s a therapist reminded me, changing how I feel is an inside job. It simply doesn’t work to fill the emotional hole inside me—the feeling that I’m not good enough and I need something to make me good enough—with something from the outside. And trying to—or wanting to, which is kind of the same thing as trying to—have more, be more, than I am and have right now just makes me feel worse.

Changing my insides is hard and slow, but I am doing it. I am doing it by using EMDR therapy to heal the old traumas trapped inside me, meditating every morning, and other stuff. And it is working. Just the fact that I wrote that sentence in that little notebook, that sometimes these days I can look around at my house and my life and like what I see—that tells me it’s working.