Why is it so hard to admit to what I want – to myself and others?

I’m trying to be more honest – answer the phone when it rings and don’t pretend that you can’t hear it, don’t tell yourself you’re going to the gym if you know there’s no chance in hell you’re waking up in the morning – but it’s hard.  Because the more honest I am with myself, the more I realize how crazy I just might be.  And crazy?  Crazy doesn’t really get the happy endings.  They get insane stories and weird looks and entertaining conversations.  But happy endings?  Nowhere in sight.

I could list a lot of random, crazy things that people don’t know about me (and was considering it) but that wouldn’t get me any closer to the point I was trying to make, would it?  So instead, a list of scarily honest things that you don’t know about me.

• Sometimes I worry that I may actually be the evil twin.
• It worries me – and shakes my confidence – that no one knows anyone they could set me up with.  Sure, I don’t know anyone, but the collective of my friends, really?  How bad is that.
• What if my writing really isn’t good enough?  Or worse, it’s good enough to be exactly what it is – a book good enough to be downloaded for free but never purchased by anyone I didn’t have to cajole.  What if this is exactly where my writing is supposed to be?
• What if I have too much faith, so much that I completely miss the lifeboat come to “save” me?
• I love to read but don’t do it often because I worry that I’ll get lost, swallowed whole by the words of others and never find my way out again.
• I could have never written my first book without pancakes.  And now that I can’t have pancakes, will any book I write ever be that good again?  What if gluten IS the secret ingredient to greatness.  I mean, come on, that’s what beer is made of.
• Some people don’t get the happy ending.  Maybe I’m the sidekick in my own life and I don’t get one either.  Not everyone does.
• What if the life I have now is exactly the one I’m meant to have and I’ll just be mildly unfulfilled, restless, and unhappy . . . forever?

Life is full of worry and fear and hard truths.  We try to ignore them most of the time – package them away in the attic so we can’t see them, thinking that out of sight can truly mean out of mind.  But that’s not the way life works.  Sometimes bad things happen, sometimes horrible things are true, sometimes life is nothing like you wish for it to be.

What do we do then?  Keep on wishing or find something else to search for?