I realized something recently that has me both depressed and enlightened. My realization is that most of my personal barriers are different than I thought they were. Sadly, I am finding that my truer barriers reflect far deeper flaws than I had hoped. About a year ago I decided that to remove two barriers that I thought would open the road to peace, joy and everlasting happiness…time and weight. I decided that in order to “live my best life” (thanks Oprah) that I needed to really focus on what would make me happier and that was to lose weight and quit my job to have more flexibility. I postulated that if I quit my job I would have lots of time to learn new things, volunteer more, develop myself, be a more patient parent and wife, blah, blah, blah. I also postulated that losing weight would make me more confident in the world, better at meeting new people, able to deepen intimacy, blah, blah, blah.
Well, here I am six months post job quitting and 45lbs lighter and guess what? I am still too busy and still not physically confident. It turns out that the things that I believed were my barriers weren’t. Finding euphoria and everlasting peace turns out to be harder than I ever imagined. So, I continue to work on the bigger goals with the help of a shelf full for self-improvement books. In the meantime, I am holding out some that thought I was wrong and pinning my hopes for personal happiness on losing a few more lbs and having a few more hours when my daughter goes to kindergarten.
