Oprah, can you hear me?
Today I had a rude awakening morning.
You’ve had these mornings, too. They are the ones where you are thrashing about in one of those nightmares that hides as a dream, and then suddenly — bam! — you bolt upright in your bed, blinking away the sleep, trying to piece the whole storyline together, knowing it made perfect, logical, even chronological sense in your dozy half-conscious but in the light of day — Is it really already morning? — it appears the dream-making gnomes that rent space in your brain happened upon the crack supply last night and had themselves a hootenanny.
Bonus points for the outsized, torturous cacophony of it all if you are sleeping off the last of the holiday cookies and candy ingestion, battling the hormonal weather system chaos of perimenopause, or perseverating over intellectual hobgoblins of this year’s Big Project.
Or, if you’re like me, all three.
And, last night I met Oprah Winfrey.
Not in Boston, where I am cozily ensconced in my bed, but in my dream-mare. Because, for some reason that only the dream-mare factory gnomes comprehend, she was at the same cocktail party as me.
Don’t get it twisted: this isn’t a dream about me being at some fancy party with Elvis and Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe (the gnomes see death as no obstacle). This is about being at a party with normal folks and just being normal. And if the dream-mare factory gnomes haven’t impressed you yet, their ability to make Oprah a normal person should do the trick.
And, then, there was me. In the dream-mare, I’m anything but normal. I’m outsized me: spectacularly passionate, all-in, nothing halfway me. My heart (and my liver and my lungs and my kidneys) are worn on my sleeve. I’m dialed up, locked down, all systems go. I’m making all the big talk, bonding with dear friends, creating memories. Until Oprah walks in.
Clearly the one ridiculously hairy audacious goal that I set for my book, Limitless — the one I never actually would will into fruition — is still lingering in the back of my head as 2020 dares me to do it one bigger: Get it into the hands of Oprah. (Followed, of course, by Have Oprah Fall in Love with It and Me, Get Invited Onto SuperSoul, Write a Regular Column for O, The Oprah Magazine, and on and on and on.) And, it’s not because of the fame and glory, it’s because I truly believe in the core of my being that her audience would resonate with what I write.
So, I told her. (Or, at least I tried. See above: dream-mare gnome factory.)
Imagine this: you finally get a moment with Your Wildest Dream Person, and you have her Full Oprah See Through Walls Focus, and you beautifully craft a short, succinct, but magnetic narrative of the crux of your life’s outlook which you put into book form one year earlier. And she’s picking up what you are laying down. Like, all of it. Oprah is all “mmm-hmm,” and “oh, yes,” and gorgeous curly hair nodding along with every word. You’re bold, you’re funny, you bond.
You explain that this book is based on 20 years of interviewing people at the top of their game, all of whom were super successful, which is why as an executive recruiter you wanted to talk to them.
Oprah responds, “Of course, only the best!”
And you continue and tell her that even though they were at the top of their game and were super successful, they still wanted to talk to you about a new job, because they weren’t very happy.
Oprah responds, “Oh, yes.”
As soon as you explain that you became fascinated by this dichotomy, that success didn’t always equal happiness — Oprah interjects, “Been there!” — and you tell her that began to think about those few individuals who had both, and how you yourself made specific changes in life to have both too, and from that, you came up with this rubric of consonance.
Oprah, “Ooooh, fascinating. I know we’ve all had this moment when we look around and think, ‘I have achieved something, and I should be happy. So, why aren’t I happy?’’” And in your mind you’re already imagining the studio audience nodding along.
You’re. On. Her. Couch.
And you tell her how you realized that we all spend so much time pursuing everyone else’s definition of success, pursuing everyone else’s path and checking off everyone else’s list, and then wake up one day and realized that you’ve got a great life, but maybe it’s a life for someone else.
Oprah’s eyes light up in that way where you suddenly feel less badly for pulling her away from the eggnog and so you press on, undaunted, because she gets it! She gets you!
“Well, you see, happiness really comes down to having four things: calling, connection, contribution, and…. and… and… and…”
And your mind goes blank. You are standing with Oprah, who is locked and loaded and engaged and head bobbing and your mind cannot come up with the fourth plank of a platform you’ve been selling to thousands of audience members from stage, on hundreds of podcasts, on the TODAY Show and on Good Morning America, for a full year. A full year!
Nothing. You’ve got nothing.
So instead of saying “control” — damnit, they all start with C, how hard can this be?!? — you mumble “vision” which makes no sense whatsoever and wander back to salve your grief with about a gigajillion red & green iced, confectioner sugared, homemade anxiety pills of flour, sugar, and butter. (Did I mention the holiday cookie hangover I was sleeping off?)
/scene
Now, it’s 4:47am and I’m bolt upright in bed, rudely awakening by those fucking factory gnomes, trying to figure out what to do with this little belated holiday gift. As far as I can tell, my options are:
-
Feel badly that I didn’t actually make Oprah happen and see 2019 as an incomplete disappointment.
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Hear the gnomes’ cautionary tale and shrink back my goals to a level that is a wee bit less stratospheric.
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Decide that the gnomes are crack-smoking assholes who have no idea what I’m made of and what I’ve got in store for them for 2020.
Pfft. It’s like those little men haven’t even met me.
For me, 2019 was unexpected, unplanned, and unimaginable. And yes, the gnomes brought me Oprah as a reminder of the unfinished business of so many podcasts I never got, so many blurbs I never got, so many stages I never got. But as I stood brushing my teeth in the dark bathroom this morning, I realized that I could simply decide it was different, that Oprah represented something different: the courage and spunk and wild-eyed optimism I brought through this entire magical mystery tour of a career shift into book writing and speaking and media.
And just like that, Oprah was no longer an anxiety provoker, but rather — and I think she’d dig this recasting — a cheering section. “You get a dream! And you get a dream! And you get a dream!”
When we do the hard things, the scary things, the bowel-shaking things, we have a choice. We can either listen to the gnomes and the hobgoblins and the naysayers telling us that we are going to fail, or we can choose to hear them as a true sign that we are stretching and growing and reaching for that which we thought previously impossible for us. Suddenly the “You’ve never done this before!” becomes “You’re trying new things” and the “You don’t know what you’re doing!” becomes “Think about how much you’ll learn!” and the “Oh my god you’re going to fail!” becomes “Holy cow, you might succeed!”
It is a well-trod statistic that public speaking is most people’s biggest fear. (Seriously, number one. That means that it’s higher than death, though understandably some might conflate the two experiences.) And yet, there are studies that show that when people simply recast their fear of public speaking as excitement about getting on stage and sharing their message, they suddenly have less anxiety. The feelings of fear and excitement actually produce the same physiological effects in the body. Sometimes it can be as simple as the stories we tell ourselves about the feelings that we have.
So, screw you, dream-mare factory gnomes. You may control the dark recesses, but you’ve got nothing on my power of spin in the light of day. I have a masters degree in political management, after all. I was trained for this!
I don’t have any big plans to make New Year’s resolutions. I’ve never really been a fan anyway, what with the pressure and the societal norming of it all. But insofar as I use the new year as a punctuation mark to set in place a new outlook, I think going into 2020 with a cheering section beats carting into the new year any last vestiges of goal-tempering anxieties.
In other words, strap in motherfuckers, 2020 is going to be a wild ride.
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