episode 79: no one feels 100% one hundred percent of the time
Listen here to this episode. Transcript follows.
Today’s topic was inspired by a conversation I had with a woman who helps me out with a lot of my social media content for both this podcast and for my business - if you don’t know, I own a tattoo studio in Ventura County, CA. We were texting back and forth one day, discussing Instagram strategy for marketing, and she was saying to me something like “your passion for what you do really comes across in your posts.” Awesome compliment, loved that.
But what happened next was more interesting. We got into a dialog about pursuing your passion, and the ever present adage: if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. I have one thing to say about that - FALSE. Hate to burst your bubble, but even if you love your vocation, it’s still, well, work. One of the hardest things about being a career artist, or being a self-employed person who does indeed love what they do, is that you have to balance that love with it becoming a way to make a living. I spent many many years as a professional musician - well over 20 in fact - and burnout, let me tell you, it’s a real thing.
The raw truth of the matter is your tastes for what you love are highly personal; they’re yours and yours alone. And while those things may resonate with other people, it’s never ever going to be to the degree of your own love for it. So, in order to connect with others - and in my case to get them to spend money on getting tattooed - you have to compromise your ideal “thing” to match the marketplace. You just do. Call it selling out or whatever, but basically it’s impossible to do what you want 100 percent of the time and make a living at it. Because your clients or buyers or customers just aren’t YOU.
That - as a musician - was an impossible pill for me to swallow. As a result, I was highly ideological about what I would do, what I would record, what I would release, who I’d play with, and so on. And then when I was still laboring in obscurity, doing side man gigs in the shadows that maybe paid relatively OK while everyone else got the recognition and the real money, I got jaded. I told myself, I’m not going to sell out just to make money, oh no, I’ve got waaaay more integrity than that.
Guess what. You can’t retire on integrity. Just saying.
So I ended up getting pretty bitter and burned out and frustrated, and at the ripe age of 40, I was simply done with music. Do I miss it? Sometimes. But more than anything I’m grateful for the lessons those years of laboring in the shadows gave me, especially when it comes to my current business and to life in general.
Everything really truly balances out. Good days, bad days. Self help and personal development coaches teach you things like “the one path to true happiness” and such. I’m not here to give you that kind of Pollyanna talk, nope. I’m here to tell you that no one feels 100% one hundred percent of the time about anything - about their job, their life, their kids, their relationship - and you know what, that’s OK. We need to have both ups and downs to truly appreciate stability, and that middle area where we can sit in gratitude for what we do have. It’s not perfect but it is.
Here’s an example. When you get into a relationship and fall in love, life becomes rosy and beautiful. It’s all about losing yourself in that heady feeling of being with that person. Your heart pounds, it’s exciting to connect, and speaking from experience for me it felt like going from living in black and white to suddenly seeing the world in full color.
Well, as anyone in a long term committed relationship knows…that gagagoogoo phase has an expiration date. There comes a point where things get real, if you know what I mean. I feel like too the older you get, the quicker that point arrives, because you just have so many more life variables to deal with, say kids or custody agreements or crazy work schedules that you may not have had in your early relationships in your 20s.
So unless you become emotionally mature and learn to modulate your expectations, you may go into a new relationship in your 40s or 50s with the same mindset as a 21 year old. That it’s going to feel just as magical. And it may for a bit, until the ex wife calls or your kid gets sick on date night. Poof, we go from magic to reality. And if we haven’t emotionally grown up, we may start to think that something is wrong with the relationship.
Another context? Let’s say you got into that relationship in your 20s and went on the crazy rollercoaster of young love with your partner. Now it’s 10, 20, 30 years later and all you want to do is eat ice cream in your sweatpants, and you’re sick of his snoring at night. You think, wow, what am I doing here? How did we end up here? Something must be wrong. I don’t feel that rush anymore, those butterflies, that crazy lust. Sure we can have a conversation, but I just need more.
Do you see where I’m going? Much like expecting following a passion as a job to be exhilerating and fulfilling all of the time, many of us expect our long term relationships to follow that path as well. Then when things get real or even hard, we blame ourselves and think something in wrong. We think we need a complete life overhaul and we buy the books or the courses or the therapy sessions.
You don’t always need those things. The lesson truly is to be able to weigh the good and the bad, and if the effort is worth the end result, then why do we need things to be 100%? Nothing is and ever will be perfect. You know why? Because we’re human. Personal growth as an industry truly can be so toxic because so much of it is centered around BLAME for things that are simply natural human reactions. We doubt if we’re doing the right thing because we don’t feel motivated all the time, for example, or we question our marriage because those sparks don’t fly the same way they did decades back. Stop expecting to feel 100% all the time - about anything. Here are some things to try.
One - allow yourself to have bad days or to feel negatively on occasion. It doesn’t mean that something is wrong with what you’re doing, or who you’re with…it just means that you’re human. The woman I was talking about in the opening of this episode? I let her know that there are plenty of tattoos I do that I don’t necessarily feel enthusiastic or passionate about doing. And that’s ok. You know why? Because what’s most valuable to me as a tattoo artist is seeing my clients feel good. And if that’s with a design I’m not crazy about that means something to them? That’s cool. That’s balance right there - there’s enough good in what I do to make the less exciting things much more tolerable.
Two - adjust your expectations. Stop using magical thinking as a solution to your problems. An example here is expecting that a relationship is going to fix all of your issues. Yikes. But so many of us think that if we just find *the right person* that everything else will feel great. Guess what? Getting into a serious relationship only accelerates the insecurities you may have. The early stages may mask your problems, but in times, they’ll rear their ugly heads once again. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the relationship - it just means that your issues took a temporary backseat. There’s no one fix for our issues - no job, no achievement, no relationship will ever make up for taking care of our own mental health, just saying.
Three - express gratitude for the good moments that ARE while taking the good with the bad. Keep your focus on the good outweighing the bad - the two can indeed coexist. And both SHOULD coexist. Without the bad, how would we have any way to measure how good things can be? I recommend taking a step back from time to time and just observing your life as an outsider. When you were little, did you think things would end up this way? What things do you have right now that you never dreamed you could have? My big measure? I think back to the years when I literally had to steal my toilet paper from janitorial closets because I was so poor I couldn’t afford to buy it. Seriously. And now if I have a day when I don’t feel like I have enough, I look at my current life as an outsider and compare it to those days in my late teens. And all I can feel is gratitude, even if stuff isn’t perfect.
If your life isn’t perfect, cool. Stop trying to make it that. You won’t and you can’t - and that’s ok. I give you permission to not be happy or optimistic or 100% some of the time. As long as you have more good than bad, you’re simply being human in the best possible way.