RouletteWeekend

So much for spending all the time I wasn’t on social media writing blogs. So much for good intentions. I think I made it a week or so before I looked at my Facebook and Instagram again. Just briefly, but I looked, reposted a few things, then remembered why I got off in the first place.

It’s funny. When I was younger, raising three kids (by three different dads) by myself, working a fast food or daycare job while going to college, weekend drinking, and spending my weekday evenings attempting to be a good mom, I rarely felt inadequate as a person. I think I realized over the last few days that it was because social media didn’t exist.

Right now, when you log onto social media, you pretty much only have 2 versions of reality being thrown at you no matter what time of day you look: people thriving at their digital nomad careers, getting people to pay them hundreds of dollars for whatever service they offer allowing them the freedom of time and travel to live a life most people only dream of making me, personally, feel like I’ve done something or forgot to do something terribly important in my life that would allow me the freedom of time and travel as well. Or, the other side of the coin, our so-called president continuing to attempt to create a new and improved nazi regime in the United States, taking away rights of women and non-white people, allowing children to get shot in schools while yelling about pro-life, and watching children on the other side of the world very quickly starve to death in front of our eyes in real time because while they may not have food, they still have internet service.

Sometimes, it feels like too much. And depending on which side of the internet you land on in any given day, it’s a coin toss as to whether you will feel grateful because you were able to feed your kids or yourself today, or you will feel like you are not enough because you envy the freedom of the people who have come up with some idea, some way to live the life they want of traveling to exotic places, seemingly never working, but somehow selling you their “system” of how to do it yourself.

To be fair, no, I have never purchased any of these said systems to be a digital nomad. I’m not sure I’m tech savvy enough to be a digital nomad. Plus, it seems you have to have some college educated skill, or at the very least, a technical school skill like coding or something in tech.

But what I rarely see, and maybe it’s out there and my algorithm just hasn’t allowed me to see it, but I rarely see people just getting by. People who are waking up and going to work everyday or waking up and, like myself, not going to work every day anymore.

And I’ve talked myself into not sharing my life on social media because I don’t want the judgement of people thinking I’m selfish because I made a decision to not get another job for someone else at the moment because I don’t think there are any jobs in Myrtle Beach that I would want to do. I want to help people but I also don’t want to work for CEO’s who don’t know how to lead their teams. I don’t want to work with people who think their way is the only way even if there is a better way. I don’t want to give all my energy and intellectual property to someone or something that will not appreciate it.

So what am I doing instead? I’m at home, cleaning the house, feeding the plethora of animals we have, mowing the grass, and doing social media for Will’s real estate business so he can do the work, get the glory and the fame, and I can maybe finish this book series I’ve been saying I’m writing for the last ten years and work on myself for a bit.

But even typing it seems selfish.

I always said when I raised my kids, I was going to take some time for myself to do what I wanted to do, but after raising them, I jumped straight into a relationship with someone who “needed” me at the time, so I continued to bust my ass, working to help someone else find their dream and do what it is that they wanted to do. But now he’s there. He’s doing what he wants to do. He’s good at it and we are finally, almost, in a place where he is actually making more than enough for us to scrape by.

We have about two more weeks of hardcore financial struggle and then things will be on the upswing. That’s the thing about real estate, you can never tell from one month to the next how it’s going to go, but right now, he seems to be on solid ground with a solid stream of clients who are buying and he’s closing on 3 of the 4 listings he has.

And still I feel selfish, like I should be trying to figure out how to make money, because society has told us that we are not allowed to just sit back and enjoy life for a bit. We have to always be hustling. Always be thinking of our next big thing. And I’m tired of buying into it.

So, I guess, what I’m saying, is that I’m choosing selfish for a while. I want to spend some time enjoying my life. My whole life. Not just sharing the highlight reel stuff and hiding the ugly parts. I want to enjoy my feet in the sand as often as possible. I want to enjoy cooking new things. I want to enjoy sitting down at the computer and staring at it for hours guilt-free if I don’t know what to write. And I want to stop feeling bad about not fitting into the box that the world thinks I should fit in. Or maybe it’s the box that I think I should fit in. Maybe the world doesn’t care at all what I’m doing because they are too worried about what they are doing?

That’s a thought.

So, I’m sticking to my guns for a bit. I’m going to be selfish. I’m going to guard my time. I’m going to spend it with people who make me happy. I’m going to go do things and see things and experience things that make me feel creative. And I’m going to do it unapologetically until I decide to do something else.

I’m choosing selfish.