A Change of Motivation

 

I'm a pretty old dog, and often when I think I've come up with a new way of looking at things, I find that it's not new at all.  I'll go back and look at my writings of five or ten or even twenty years ago, and find that I've been wrestling with the same issues and coming up with the same "epiphanies" for my entire adult life.

But I think I have actually come up with something new in the past couple of days.

Looking back on my life as an introvert "doer," I see that my motivation for "doing" is almost always negative.  I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm hurt, I'm embarrassed, I'm overmatched.    So I hitch up my big girl panties, turn on my heel and head toward something...else.  It seems to take a hefty smack of fury, sadness or self-loathing to get me going.  And since I so excel at all those negative emotions, I don't stay in one place for very long. 

As an introvert, I don't have a big circle of friends and acquaintances.  But I do tend to drag the few other people in my life--my husband, my family--in my wake.  Which is sometimes a good thing, because without me dragging them around, they probably wouldn't do anything.  But, lately, I have come to understand that I'm just TIRED of that whole dynamic.  I need to do what I would like to do, and allow everyone else to do the same.   

I don't want to be angry anymore.  I don't want to be sad, or frustrated.  I want to choose a goal through the light of peace and joy, and then chart a course for it.  If someone wants to come along, that's fine.  But they don't have to.  And it has to be okay if they don't want to.  I have noticed that I have a habit of assigning negative attributes to the people in my life who don't want to do whatever I am doing. 

I am particularly that way with the husband.  And that is not something I can continue to do, in light of my fresh understanding that I need to get a life and allow him to have his.  My attitude can no longer be, "Fuck him.  I'm going to do this anyway!"  It has to be, "Wow!  Here is something I really would like to do.  And I can!"  ...with no negative reflection upon any other person or his/her choices in life. 

Positive motivation.  That's my new goal.  I need to learn how to move forward in happiness and joy.