Let me preface this by saying I am sick. I have been sick all week but I try my hardest not to let that show. I get so tired of everyone always being sick and therefore I try not to add to the constant complaining by keeping it to myself when I feel badly. All week I could feel the sore throat and the stopped up head but I just kept going and ignored it. I think if you ignore a cold for long enough it goes away. My husband marvels at how I can fight illness when I am too busy to fool with it! But it always catches up to me, even if it is a month down the road, eventually I can fight it no more. So now I have three days off (sort of) so it has hit me hard. I feel very fortunate that it has been nearly a year since I have been sick! All of this to say I am extra sensitive because I don’t feel well.
If you are a regular reader you know about my furniture escapades in the lobby of Reynold’s at school. Well, when I came back from the break on Monday they had turned a couple of chairs around to add them to the main seating (kind of like I originally had it before they made me change it, but with the different chairs that don’t match) and had left an end table floating out in the room alone and then- oh well suffice it to say it was all messed up. I figured they would put the chairs back since the meeting was over but as of Thursday they did not. In an effort to honor the fact that they obviously needed that extra seating I had tastefully provided but they had rejected, I left the unmatching chairs where they were and put the odd, floating end table between the chairs. When I came in on Friday they had totally redone the whole room basically putting it all back like it was before any of this started. It looked fine except for the yellow and green striped settee that is back to back with the pink and rust chairs, which makes me ill. But hey, it’s not my room! My only worry is that now when the next show rolls around and the furniture needs to be tweaked again, the “lobby bosses” (whoever they are) will be unreceptive to letting us move the furniture. I could have, should have, and would put it back just like it was but they might not trust that now. And even though it is not technically my problem since I won’t be doing box office this time, I feel responsible, as usual.
Then today I received an email from a lady in the UMW at our church. So as not to bore you with another long story let’s just say that while I was president I tried to do what I thought was asked of me. I shook things up a bit, tried to make things better and get the younger women of the church involved. I streamlined the meetings so we didn’t end up meeting every week, no one has time for that especially young moms. And I tried to make our meetings “events.” One complaint that I heard when I first took office was that very few people came to the meetings and for the speaker and really all of us, it was often embarrassing how few people were there. So I planned events- shows if you will. I also consolidated the meetings down from 9 to 6 per year. We began to have as many as a hundred people at a meeting as opposed to the 30 or so from before. All of this was done with the consent of the board even though now I think they were too lazy to argue and just glad someone was willing to be president for two years so they let me run amok!
Needless to say, I am no longer active in this organization even though I belonged to this group for about 16 years and for two years I gave them all of my time, talents, sanity and tons of money as president. I dressed as Dorothy from the “Wizard of Oz” for them, I moved my dining room table over to the church for them, I sang a song with a smile on my face on the night my son was lost in China for them. I am too busy with school now to participate but I intended to return to “active duty” as soon as I graduated. Not any more.
Little by little I have seen where all of the changes I made, all of the work I put in, has slowly been changed back to the old way of doing things. It is like the furniture in Reynold’s, it is all back where it started, as if it were never changed. I guess that means I was wrong and no one else really thought anything I had done was worth the effort. It makes me reexamine all of the time and effort I put into these endeavors. In my weakened and sickly state I feel very defeated today.
And therefore I quit. I will no longer try to push my ideas on the unsuspecting and unwilling masses. I will NEVER (and you can mark my words) be president of anything ever again. I work and try too hard and it is a waste. I know I am a perfectionist and that is a terrible thing to be. Slouches have a much better life I think! I know I can not be a slouch, it just isn’t in me and I am too old to change that radically so I will just keep my perfectionism to myself from now on. Don’t ask me to head your committee or help you put on a fundraiser. Don’t ask my help to set up for an event. I will only try to give it 110% and I know now that is not really needed. So I am done.
What I can do is follow direction in a scene. I have to follow what the director envisions so I will gladly do as I am told. I will go where you tell me, I will be who you want me to be. And I will love it. I will try to be perfect as that character, that’s just me. But it will only be perfection with in myself, between me and who I am “pretending” to be. I have done two scenes in the past two days and I have loved the range of emotion and the ideas that were done in collaboration with my fellow directing students. Of course, I have been the actor both times- when I have to be the director, well, we shall see how that works out!
So although I am sick and discouraged now about all of the years I see as “wasted”, I know they are not. I learned something about myself. I know what I did in the past that obviously didn’t work and I know what I won’t be doing in the future!!!
