Stop Beating (and Eating) Yourself Up!

I just spent 4 days with two very influential women in my life...my friend Jayne, who is an accomplished poet and a collaborator with me on our next hilarious book about menopause...and my friend The Clay Lady, Danielle, who has owned a successful business teaching kids how to make clay art for 23 years. Both of these women are wise, warm and hysterically funny, and like me, they understand that Chocolate is a Food Group! They get it.

The three of us hunkered down together in our little booth at Nashville's Southern Festival of Books, braving cold, rainy weather and drinking lots of hot tea. Who knows if it was the weather, or my hormones, but apparently I was doing the Self-Denigration Thing in a big way, at my own Private Pity Party, every time a friend stopped by our booth. I didn't even realize I was cutting myself down, until finally Danielle grabbed me and said "STOP! I have listened to you whine and lament your failures all weekend, and now, we're going to talk about your successes!!"

And so we did. And every time I tried to duck and run into that familiar "but" territory, where Why Me? and If Only... lurks in the shadows, Danielle simply shook her head, smiled, and insisted, "Look what you have accomplished! Look what you have achieved! In 4 years!"

It dawned on me that she is RIGHT! I am my own worst enemy! I am more successful than I ever dreamed I could be, compared to where I started 4 years ago, but instead of celebrating that success, I'm drowning in self-pity, afraid to step up to the plate and hit another home-run.

Thanks, Danielle, for slapping me into reality and out of my never-ending personal comparison to that long-suffering soul, Job! Despite my raging hormones, despite my failures and the yucky weather, or the umpteen things that can go wrong and will, I can do it!

As the great philosopher and poet Ovid said, "Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish."

How lucky I am to have fished in the pool with Danielle!