Yesterday I made 2 cents in total earnings from my business and lost $10 trading forex. I got to a point where I couldn’t hold in my negative self-deprecating thoughts any longer. I started calling myself a worthless loser. I didn’t wake up in much better spirits today.

Just now I stumbled across a blog titled “The Lost Girls”.The lost girls is about:

Three twenty-something New Yorkers who ditched their media jobs to embark on a yearlong, round-the-world journey in search of adventure and inspiration.

I admit I felt an immediate mixture of admiration and envy on seeing pictures of these young girls on their travels around the world, living their lives to the fullest; but I wonder if circumstances don’t enable some people to live freely and happily while making it impossible for others to manage to get through a day without some unpleasant occurrence to remind them of the less pleasant aspects of living.

I want adventure in my own life. I want to feel inspired. Do I just get up and go?  These girls had “media jobs”. That means they were making money. They had money to afford them the  luxury of getting up and going off in search of adventure and inspiration, traipsing around the globe to such regions as Peru, Brazil, India, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali/Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia. I can’t manage to make more than two cents come out of 17 hours of work. I couldn’t afford to take off in search of adventure and inspiration.

I applaud the three young women though. It seems they are back in New York now and writing a book about their lost girls adventures. Here I am about to turn 38 and the only stories I have to tell are about a living for nearly 4 decades in a state of depression and going nowhere in life but deeper into an abysmal pit of nothingness.

Oops, this was supposed to be a positive post about not sitting around and complaining about life, but taking a lesson from others who go out and live their lives to the fullest.

Definitely let the lost girls inspire you. Don’t wait for freedom to come to you when time decides to yield and allow you to have your freedom.

Visit the lost girls blog

Someone asked me an interesting question yesterday. The question: “What is it you really want? To be rich or to be happy?” I started to answer but they shushed and told me not to answer straight away, to sleep on the question and then answer it soon after waking up from sleep in the morning. Not sure why it was important to answer soon after waking up in the morning, but here I am. I’ve slept on it. I’ve just watched a clip from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve never seen the movie. I’m thinking about putting it in the Netflix queue but not convinced yet. It seems like it might be a little bit overwrought with emotion and sappy and I don’t like things that force me to feel emotional, especially if the emotion is overwrought with sadness.

In any regard, after watching the clip I realized something important. I realized that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being depressed because I don’t have money to afford a 10-bedroom mansion or because I’m not extra-ordinarily talented or extra-ordinarily beautiful or in any way exceptional.

I am going to be 38 years old in just a little over 2 months from now. I’ve spent the last 2 decades being depressed because I’m not what I’ve always wanted to be. I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world. I don’t have the sexiest figure. I’m not more talented than everyone in everything. I am not rich and important. I’ve been torturing myself since I was 12 years old. I’ve always wanted to be more. I have never been satisfied with just being me and it has resulted in decades spent trying to escape the reality of who I am to chase the fantasy of whomsoever I’ve thought it would be better to be. It was always one person or another but never myself that I have considered special; and I have been tortured by wanting to be special not by my own estimation but in the eyes of the world.

I don’t want to continue to torture myself. I can’t allow another decade to pass with me refusing to be happy unless and until I catch whatever it is I’m chasing. I might never catch whatever it is I’m chasing and in that case, if I refuse to be happy otherwise then I will never be happy; or else I might catch it and die a day later. Meanwhile the people I care about are suffering. They are suffering by having to worry about me every day. They are suffering by feeling like they are not enough reason for me to see value in life and to be grateful for each day that I get to spend with them. By lowering the quality of my own life I lower the quality of theirs; and because I am center of my household my thoughts and my feelings control the thoughts and feelings of everyone else. Obviously my husband and my son don’t generally feel too happy or too positive because I am never happy or positive, and whatever I feel they feel.

So what do I want to care about most, my misery over being poor or the happiness of my family, myself included? I don’t like being poor, and I won’t stop trying to change my financial circumstances, but I don’t want to continue putting money concerns ahead of everything. I want to be happy and healthy; and I want the people I love to be happy and healthy. That is more important to me than having millions of dollars. In fact that is more important to me than the fact that I have no money. That we are all alive and well and have each other is not something to take for granted because it is not something that will last. I want to learn to measure the value of each day in the time I get to spend with the people I love, not in how much money I have made.

Imagine not being able to come up with $235 to get your bank account out of the deficit? Why would you prefer to be poor? No one would prefer to be poor. It’s depressing being poor. My first words to myself most mornings when I wake up are “you can’t kill yourself”. The significance of that is that I wake up most mornings thinking I should just kill myself. Call me pathetic. The fact is, the only time I feel at ease and ready to face the day is when I don’t have money problems hanging over my head. Even if I don’t have extra money lying around I can breathe more freely knowing the bills are all paid and I have another 20 or so days to raise the money to pay the bills the next month. Of course I don’t prefer to live like that; but if I can’t have extra money at least let me have enough to cover the bills. Then, I can keep away the panic that makes me think killing myself might be the solution to my problems.

I admit sometimes I feel hopeless and worthless. I feel like I don’t have anything going for me. Those are the times when I struggle most with thoughts of suicide because I feel like I’d rather be dead than forever be a nobody with nothing. I am perfectly well aware that one doesn’t need to have money to feel filled with hope and worthy, but for me everthing is tied to my success or failure and my success or  failure is determined by having or not having money at this point. If my goal was to finish my novel and I managed to finish my novel, then with or without money to show for it I would feel like a success. Right now my goal happens to be to make money so for as long as I continue to struggle and find myself with no money when I need money I see myself as failing. Failure depresses me.

Go to sleep depressed about money. Wake up depressed about money. Go through the day depressed about money. Forever and a day thinking about ways to make  money. Can’t be happy for lack of financial security. SO GET A JOB!! But it’s not even the money that’s the problem. The lack of money creates some problems that having money would remove; but it’s the failure that’s the issue. The failure to succeed at everything tried.  SO STOP TRYING AND GET A JOB!! My predicament always seems so easy to solve from everybody else’s perspective. I’ve worked too hard to just quit on myself and go invest my time and energy into someone else. I want success for me. I won’t give up on myself and give up on my dreams and sign on to make it easier for someone else to keep going after their dreams and achieve success with their goals that I help them to achieve after quitting on myself. SO STOP SHOUTING AT ME ABOUT GETTING A JOB!!
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The San Juans? Never heard of them. Until a moment ago. It’s friday. Another Friday. Another day. Friday harbour sounds interesting. A ride on a ferry would be different. A ride on the Friday Harbor Ferry? Sigh…. Maybe Washington State is the place for me. Never considered it; but still wondering where I belong. Been moving from here to there since the age of 9. Longing to find my home, you know, the place where I settle down, where the grand children know to find me. Don’t have grandchildren yet but someday I hope. In the next 10 years. My son is still young yet. Being a parent is a huge responsibility. But whenever grandchildren come I hope to be settled and happy and able to enjoy them.

Image Credit: jamieca

It’s pretty hard to work for nothing. I’ve been doing it for a year. Working 17 hours per day 7 days per week only to turn around and have to sell my websites for $600 so I can get my rent paid. When you do the Math, after working on a website for 12 months and then selling it for $600, you come out to $50 per month which is about $1.67 per day, which is about 3 cents an hour at 5 hours spent on the particular site (if I’m doing my Math correctly); so when you realize that you’re working for 3 cents per hour to power other people’s websites with your content it can be upsetting.