Something About Rainy Mondays

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Any time since the late Seventies that there has been rain on a Monday, Karen Carpenter’s refrain plays in my mind. So today, listening to the thunderous downpour outside, I heard that chorus again and decided to look up the full lyrics to “Rainy Days and Mondays.” Lo and behold, I found out that Karen must have felt like I do right now when she wrote it.

The first verse struck me because just this morning I had been “talkin’ to myself and feeling old.” I celebrated my 37th birthday a little over a week ago and for years now I have been using those numbers to beat myself up. Something like, “You are 30-something years old and you should have this all figured out by now; you should be sitting back and riding the waves of success by now, not floundering around in the surf, trying to get up on the boat!!!”

So what really upsets me about Carpenter’s lyric is knowing that she was younger when she died than I am right now.* She was a famous singer with at least sixteen number one hit songs before she was thirty! And she still felt like she’d “like to quit” and that “nothing ever seems to fit.” That same self-doubt even resulted in her own untimely death.

We see it all the time, right? People who, in our eyes anyway, seem fantastically successful, with every reason to be happy, and who self-destruct. Look at Anna Nicole Smith. Ok, so we may not all want to look up to her as a role model for success, but she’s a good example of how fame and fortune just aren’t enough.

But we know that, you must be thinking!

What is enough?

That was the topic of my rainy Monday argument with myself. I became flustered with the nagging coming from the school marm specter in my mind’s eye. She tapped her wristwatch and said, “It’s after ten a.m. and you are still fooling around on the internet. What are you going to do today? Tomorrow? With the rest of your life?” I physically waved her out of my sight and spoke aloud to the cat, the dog, the walls, the mess in the living room, and said, “I don’t have to do anything if I don’t want to! Nothing. Nothing more than what I am already doing. I don’t HAVE to be productive to be worthwhile! It’s my time to explore!”

And that’s the part that is so difficult for me. The process. The journey. The taste testing of all that life has to offer until the thing I want most becomes clear to me. I have to keep telling that other part of me to RELAX! Just because I quit my job doesn’t mean I will miraculously and instantaneously know what to do next. Some people might, but how could I? I’ve been avoiding myself for years. That part of myself that wanted things and was always told “NO!” is not going to come running right out, especially if the school marm is still hanging around telling her to “hurry along now; it’s about time you got going.”

Who wants that?

Sometimes, quitting can be a beginning. It took me a year to decide that quitting my job was better than keeping it for the sake of appearing productive. I was finally able to see what I didn’t want and convince myself that the better way to find what I did want was to give myself the time to find it. The time to play and to explore. It’s been a tough transition so far because I’ve been judging myself harshly about it. Almost every day I’ve said, “Maybe I should just go find another job.”

It’s difficult to believe that my job is to take care of myself first. It’s so much easier to take care of other people and blame them for my lack of time to discover what I want for myself. And it’s so difficult to believe that doing the thing that doesn’t reward with a paycheck is the best thing. But I guess I need to believe in the spiritual paycheck more than the monetary one. The bottom line is that it’s difficult for the woman who likes (ok, loves) control, to feel so out of control. I’m uncomfortable, but that’s a sure sign that growth is possible, right?

Hopefully, these rainy Mondays that “get me down” now, will soon turn into the sunny, blossoming days of the spring of my soul.


© Nicole J. Williams, 2007, all rights reserved.

*Karen Carpenter died the day after my 13th birthday; she was almost 33 years old.