Promote Your Own Agenda

Push your own agenda forward. Waiting around for someone else to handle it rarely works. Odd, isn't it, how we treat a favor as perfectly fine when it comes from another person, yet the same action feels wrong the moment we do it for ourselves? Maybe we're afraid of looking selfish or grabby. Whatever the reason, it leaves a crowd of irritable people walking around with their needs unmet.

There's a second group that's just as miserable, and they're the ones forever tending to everybody else while their own wants go untouched. When you take care of yourself where you reasonably can, you stop running on empty, and you stop stockpiling resentment over all the giving. Sometimes people label this pattern codependency. You see it play out in a marriage where one partner drinks and the other quietly makes it possible for the drinking to continue.

My dreams work as a kind of lie detector for me. Night after night I find myself doing the exact things I avoid, or try to avoid, when I'm awake. The first thing out of my mouth in the morning is usually, 'Who, me?' All that competitiveness, the push to stand my ground, the anger I keep tamped down, it pours out and I'm swinging away the whole night through. And no, I don't come out on top every time.

Working all day and then battling all night is wearing me out. If the world really is ending, apparently I'm racing to finish every last chore before it does. You can feel like you've finally pulled yourself together, and then you haven't, and your sleeping mind is happy to point that out. Go to bed in a decent mood and there's no promise I'll wake up in one.

What I'm picking up on, slowly, is that I can't just shove my feelings aside and play the good little saint around the clock. That's probably the reason they call sorting through your dreams 'dream work.'

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