June 3, 2022 – The Sixty-Eighth Official Friday Night BeerBlog

Oh Lordy, where do I even start with this week’s post. I’ve heard the saying “Do It Messy” more times than I care to admit in the last year or so. For a perfectionist, it’s been one of those sayings and sentiments where I have just nodded my head in agreement when someone mentions just doing or trying something new without a perfectionist net. As in, yes I agree that YOU should totally do it messy if it’s between that or nothing, but that word makes me nervous and I won’t be choosing that path.

Someone Call A Therapist

I’ve always just kind of fallen into what I’m doing, but in a very choreographed way. Does that make sense?Opportunities have come and I have manicured those opportunities to within an inch of their lives. Sometimes it may seem that these things have come easily, but I guarantee you, whether I have been aware of it or not, I have been very conscious and meticulous on how each thing was going to be working for me.

I have always believed that you can think yourself through every situation or into a new thing. That everything has an operators’ manual and all you have to do it read it and do each step to succeed. The path from A to Z goes through B and C, all the way to X, Y to Z. I’ve never felt that luck was my friend and that if anything were going to happen for me, it would be because of flawless execution.

Midlife Came With A Wrench

If you’ve read any of my first blog posts or listened to some of my early podcasts, you know that as I neared 50, midlife threw me into a tizzy. I know now that what I was experiencing not a midlife crisis like men experience, but what Brene Brown calls a woman’s midlife unraveling. For me, all of the sudden life didn’t feel right. It suddenly had a timeline I hadn’t noticed and I wasn’t doing all the things I had envisioned or dreamed for in my life. I needed to change course, like right now, or I was gonna die.

So…I wrote four screenplays. Wow. I wrote a memoir. Intense. I started this blog. OK. I started The New Old You podcast. Yep. And I began to create write daily affirmations that I posted on Instagram. Great. I must have been wrapped tight because there was A LOT of unravelling being done.

After a couple of years of this unravelling, I began to wonder what it all meant. I believed it was all leading somewhere, maybe even somewhere great, but wasn’t sure where. Feel me?

But worse is that it has all felt very messy and not well put together. And this drives me absolutely crazy. I mean like really – I can show you the notebooks upon notebooks of journaling questions and statements like “what am I doing?” or “get your shit together Lesley” and mostly “you can figure this out!”

I know I am not alone in these feelings or this unraveling. I’m friends with a lot women like this. We’ve all been trying to figure it out and get our shit together. But after a couple of years I am seeing other women finally figure it and starting to move confidently out of the fog and I’m still been standing here, frozen in uncertainty.

Put Down Your Purse And Get On With It Already

I know it’s all me and my need for it to be perfect. I’ve been dabbling and afraid of making any REAL mental or financial moves until the time or the thing was PERFECT. And if life teaches us anything it’s that there is no such thing as perfect. And the opposite of perfect is messy. What a conundrum for us perfectionists.

So of course, all movement is good movement and I’ve been consistent here in the blog and on all other fronts, but without any kind of real expected outcome or expectation, financial or otherwise. And that, my friends, is where my needle desperately needs to move. Whether you care or not, I’ve made some pretty big decisions over the last couple of weeks that should become apparent in the next few weeks and months. At least I hope they do.

What I do know from the last couple of years of spinning my wheels is that I am going to continue building on the decision to help women in this new phase of life. But let’s just say I think my focus is going to be on fitness, health, wellness, and consistency. And I feel really good about it.

So What Am I Saying?

So what AM I saying? I guess I’m saying that I believe that every woman goes through some sort of unraveling, even the most put together ones. And it’s okay. You already know that I think it’s totally fine for everyone else to do midlife messy, but it’s time to give myself permission to do the same, too. There. That’s it. And it’s weird to admit that I’m going to be doing this or that – what if I can’t or if I fail. Imperfection. How dare I?

Like this blog.

But I still take issue with the word MESSY. It’s just so…messy. I think I prefer to refer to it as “doing it slightly unorganized” or that I have “disorganized brilliance” or even that I’m busy “untangling this complex and intricate train-wreck of midlife”

They are just words and I can use them however I choose. So much better than messy.

LLM

Podcast Version:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1594894/10734684