Living in Green Bay, Wisconsin all of my adult life meant enduring Vince Lombardi kink about winning and excellence and obsession everyfuckingwhere. Dude, chill. I’m just trying to order a sandwich.
I’ve always cringed at locker room inspo (aside from Ted Lasso’s) because it feels so aggressively singular.
GO BIG OR GO HOME.
LEAVE IT ALL OUT ON THE FIELD.
WINNING ISN’T EVERYTHING, IT’S THE ONLY THING.
FUCK YOUR NEIGHBOR’S WIFE.
To me this says, expel all of your energy into the one thing you are doing so you are a quivering pile of dust when it’s all over. Cool, so you know what happens if you fail at that one thing? You feel like garbage.
Souls are gorgeous voluminous things. Which means they are very much untied to any one thing. Which means you don't need to be all-in on Jeep guy or CrossFit girl or non-binary Vegan. You get to be multiple things at once! Get ready to fill in ALL OF THE ABOVE on your 1996 Scantron!
Living a life with wide bookends is the secret to not feeling like a lumpy ball sac. Why did exactly zero of the woo life-balance preachers take us by the hand to tell us life-contrast is the real secret sauce?
Examples of delicious contrast:
Flying business class and eating a Hot Pocket when you land.
Going to to a gallery opening followed by a Monster Truck Rally.
Listening to Vivaldi then asking Siri to play The Thong Song.
Learning French while wearing a shirt that says Uff Da.
There’s room for all of it!
Yet somewhere between growing armpit hair and applying for our first mortgage, we decided we needed to be somebody. And many of us put that somebody in a box.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be the person known for one thing. I want to be the human version of an octopus - squishing myself through tight places, growing new arms, walking underwater, picking fights with sharks… Fuck yes!
I want to be Adventure Whore and Call Me Morgue and Bidet Bitch and That Emo Friend Who Always Checks In. I want to know just enough to be dangerous, but never enough to be the authority. I want to keep opening tabs but never committing to a single one. Because being the expert can be heavy and lonely.
Let it bring you comfort that the concept for this post came to me as I straddled a drinking glass at 2am to pee inside my motorhome that we hadn’t yet filled with water. And the entire time I thought, without spilling a drop, Life is so good.