I’m tired of my life.
I’d like to stop it now, and get off, please. Maybe I could ride another ride instead? I’ve spent the weekend doing laundry and keeping all my long-term commitments. I have bills to pay and tomorrow I have to go into work to keep making the money to make them. I’m part-way through doing my church’s prayer list for the prayer team, for which I’ve been forced into a leadership role very much against my wishes. And I’ve spent more time this weekend being an encouraging friend to several female friends. Worst of all, in a week, I’ll be getting my internal organs bathed in radioactive soup to see if my cancer has come back or not.
I don’t want to do this any more.
Really.
I don’t want to be that guy that’s French-kissed the Grim Reaper and lived to tell the tale. I don’t want to live in this soft, middle-aged body that’s been wrapped in too much fat from all the wrong food. I don’t want to be that guy women go to for advice about their men.
I want to drink myself blind and skip work. I want to go to a different church where no one knows me or expects anything of me. I want to be the guy who camps and skis and rides motorcycles. I want to be the guy who wakes up next to that woman so beautiful that your heart aches to see her, especially when she doesn’t know you’re watching and is totally un-self-conscious.
I want my life to be virtually effortless and filled with passion and joy. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. It really seems like I work hard, but I just get more tired and further behind. I go deeper into debt just to stay alive, or at least to know that I’m not going to die too soon.
But, I can’t help but think, what’s the point? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not contemplating suicide or anything so extreme as all that. I’m just stuck. And tired. This isn’t the life I was planning on leading. Ten years ago, or more, I had a plan, a direction, a map for getting to the life I thought I wanted, needed, to have. As it turns out, ten years is a long time and a lot can go wrong and it did. I’ve become a stranger to myself. Someone I never intended to be. I don’t know how I got here. Sometimes, I feel like this life is an ill-fitting suit I’ve been forced to wear. I just wish it were as easy to take off sometimes.
So, how do you reinvent yourself?
How do you become someone new, someone you want to be?
I know only that I don’t know, and that this week, I want to be someone other than who I am.
