Getting “Off Track!”

I have been running into people lately who have insisted that they keep meeting all the “wrong type” of people and are thinking of giving up on being with someone all together! Believe me when I say that I hear them on this. The interesting thing is that I have sort of figured this problem out! (Now let’s get this straight here…I figured it out- I didn’t say that I can fix it!) I have found that simply making the statement “I meet all of the wrong people” brings more of whatever your definition of “the wrong people” is. We can really get into a rut that seems to leave us stuck wondering if things will ever change. The problem is that the more time and energy we allow our minds to give this problem, the bigger the problem it becomes!

Here’s an example: I thought I had it all together in my 20’s when I met a guy who seemed to be who I was “meant to have met” and spend my life with. Wow! How confident I was that I had it all!

Scene fades in…Calia is sitting at her ping pong table (yeah…well I was in my 20’s and in college…who needs more than a ping pong table as her dining room table?)

Calia’s inner voice: Wow! I’m so lucky! I have met this great guy and I am ready to have it all- good times, vacations together, I’ll probably get married, I’m going to get my first job in my new exciting career, I’ll have a house and children and live happily ever after! Everybody wants to be me!

(cue the doom music that Calia can’t hear lurking in the background…)

Calia’s friends: Wow! We want to be you!
Calia: I bet you do!

(fast forward a few months…cue the thunder and clouds in the sky getting ready to open up a storm over Calia and the guy’s beautiful new house as the guy starts to suck the life and personality from Calia’s every living breath!)

Calia’s inner voice: Boy! I’m so excited! This is sure a beautiful day! I’m really on my way to having everything! Everybody wants to be me!
Calia’s friends: Have you heard from Calia lately? She is really in a bad situation. She’s not allowed to call us anymore. She has really changed!

(cue the roar of the monster hiding in the closet next to Calia’s beautiful dresses!)

Calia: Look at all of my beautiful dresses! Everybody wants to be me!

(fast forward a few months…cue Calia’s mother coming to the end of the driveway of Calia’s ex’s new house as she picks Calia up with only her beautiful dresses and the license plate from the car she has just signed over to the ex!)

Calia:…
Calia:…
Calia:…I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming…I don’t even want to be me!

Calia picks up her old car from a lot that she had left it on when she bought a new one the year before that would be acceptable to her new boyfriend. The crying Calia gets into the old car after the friendly guy at the lot pulls the license plate from her weak and shaking hands and puts it onto it. She pulls out of the lot and 100 feet from where it had sat for a year, the muffler drops off into the street…She opened the door, got out and started walking…She wasn’t sure exactly where she was going. Just walking I guess…Her new apartment with nothing in it but the dresses she took from the house she thought she had started her future in and the silverware her parents had put into the drawers in the kitchen didn’t seem to make her very happy. But then again, nothing really made her happy anymore. So she just kept walking…

The next chapter starts but unfortunately it is longer than Calia’s “plan” had originally intended. She wasn’t sure what was making her more unhappy: Losing him, or losing all that time and having to completely start over after believing that she had already started her life!...yeah…she decided that all she needed to do was meet someone else and quickly start again! She gave herself a specific time-frame- 5 minutes! That was all she had right?...She even set an alarm on her blackberry to go off 6 months later with the message “get a life!”…OMG!...that thing went off every 6 minutes for 4 weeks until she decided that hitting the snooze on this negative message was becoming counterproductive to actually “getting a life!” She’d go on dates with the “wrong guy” and the alarm would go off! He’d ask what it was. She’d politely tell him. “Yeah…it’s my biological clock!”…This was actually extremely hilarious to her in a sort of “poke your eyes out” kinda way…the guy never thought it was quite as funny for some reason though.

That chapter ended a few years later- way behind schedule, with absolutely no worth while content…other than some pretty funny dating stories. Dating when you’re not ready and constantly choosing to date people who your subconscious mind has picked out to prove to your conscious that life, indeed sucks, can throw you way off track but can make for some really great tales to commiserate about with other jaded, angry people who are paddling in circles in the same boat! Something happened as she came to that realization. She woke up one day and turned off that alarm. At first the silence was deafening…then it was a little scary…then it was soothing…

Ahh…

No more pressure to get “on track”. No more self-defeating dates with people who were more of the same. No more commiserating with people about how “there’s no one out there!” No more negative energy. No more need to have done things on the time frame that had already long passed. No more believing that since it didn’t happen the way she had planned it to happen, that it would never happen. The more she had tried to control it, the more energy she had put into believing that no good was ever going to come and that time was up. She took up a new phrase that she really started to enjoy. In fact, she used it nearly all the time. She found her old playful giggle as she started to free her self-imposed restrictions and negative believes with it.

“What are they going to do to me?”…

• What are they going to do to me if I love my life?
• What are they going to do to me if I meet the one a little later and the old “not the one” is one or two divorces ahead of me?
• What are they going to do to me if I have my children a little later because something magical saved me from false starting my life and living completely on the wrong track?
• What are they going to do to me if I drive 95 on the highway?...okay…um… ‘giggle’…so they actually can do something about that…oh well…you live, you learn…hee hee…

The point is simple: When you think you’re off track, it’s very easy to stay on that track for much longer than you need to. You don’t have to impose a specific age and set of circumstances that you must have to make you happy. You can make a list of the things that you would like to achieve. In fact, I would suggest it. It’s nice to be clear about what it is you are looking for. Just make sure those are the things you really want and you are putting yourself into situations that bring you closer to finding them. In the meantime, don’t sit around waiting for your life to start! Do everything in the world you’ve ever wanted to do and life will find you! That’s what I call getting yourself on the right track!

Note: I wrote this in response to an email that I got that I was unable to respond to because I didn’t know where to send it. I hope it helps to make things clear enough to recognize that you are exactly where you are meant to be right now, and changing a few simple things about the way you treat yourself will set your life in motion towards everything you’ve imagined for your future. Possibly this is more wordy than “entertaining” but I’m like that sometimes! Happy day! Calia