This past weekend was really weird. I had my SIE initiation on Saturday night and fortunately, waterboarding was not in the program. Apparently, it wasn’t that kind of initiation. Instead, we had a buffet and mid-priced wine…and I got to meet my arch-nemesis from my online Applied Research Methods class. This guy drove me insane. I always manage to find the second-smartest person in the class (behind me, of course) and fixate on him for twelve weeks. I say “him” because generally, it has been a guy. For someone who considers herself to not be terribly competitive, I seem to be…terribly competitive. Anyway, Arch-Nemesis and I had a good time bagging on the professor and our insane workload in the class.

Where was I going with this?

OH - our guest speaker was one of the school’s professors, and she basically told us the story of her life up until that point. We’ll call her Dr. Light Bulb. She talked of an over-achieving, perfectionist, type-A personality. She talked frankly of having what she dubbed a “charmed life” - pretty much anything she wanted came easily to her in terms of accomplishments. School came easily, corporate advancement came easily…and then around her early 30s, everything sort of started to hit the skids. She started realizing what she thought she wanted, wasn’t probably what she was supposed to do. However, because she was the way she was, she desperately tried to fit that round peg into the square hole because if you can’t get it to fit, then you have failed. Long story short, she just recently completed her Ph.D after nine years and wanted to share what she had learned along the way, since she was surrounded by other overachieving, perfectionist, type-A personalities.

Listening to her, it was like I had been hit by a huge boulder. This woman had experienced everything I have over the years, including the conflicting burdens and benefits of leading a so-called “charmed life.” Although we had worked very hard for everything we had achieved, when we sort of started to sputter and hiccup, or found ourselves in the flat-out wrong situation…it was near-devastating. We HAVE to fix it! We HAVE to make it what it needs to be! It sounds weird to the more even-keeled (like Capt. UberHusband), but…it is what it is.

After the program finished up, I walked up to Dr. Light Bulb and told her that what she said, clichéd as it sounds, really resonated with me. I am incredibly hard on myself. I give myself zero slack. If something looks like it’s about to fail, I will do everything within my power to ensure it doesn’t fail. Relationships, friendships, work projects, my car battery…I will spend an excessive amount of time trying to “save” something. Fortunately though, over the years experience has afforded me the wisdom to know what is really worth saving…for the most part. I think that’s incredibly important. She responded by saying she had a feeling more than one person in that group would be able to identify with her journey, and she’d hoped that she could save us from spending another fifteen years trying to fit round pegs into square holes.

So. When you combine this with the umpteen high school & college friends I’ve reconnected with via the Social Networking Revolution (thank you, Facebook and LinkedIn) and my 20-year reunion looming next year, I decided to go revisit my senior-year high school yearbook to reconnect with what I was like when I was younger. Plus, everyone’s been telling me I look exactly the same…so I have to go see if they look exactly the same. Heh.

Clearly we only had about nine television channels at our house back then (and no Internet), because I was involved in just about everything under the sun. When on Earth did I have time to do everything I appear to have done that year? No wonder I kept breaking up and getting back together with my boyfriend. I’m sure it had to do with schedule availability.

As I was flipping through the autograph supplement in the back of the yearbook, I noticed a trend in what people wrote.  Here’s a sample:

• “I hope you enjoy Santa Barbara.  Good luck in your classes - don’t burn out! And above all - relax!”
• “I hope you like UCSB next year.  Just remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, so relax and enjoy life!”
• “If you don’t stop stressing out you might die young and the world needs your input.”
• “Someday when you’re suffering from hypertension, I’ll counsel you.”
• “Please keep in touch when you go away and don’t forget to take your vitamin B - it helps for stress.  Ha ha.”
• “You’re really a nice person and fun to be around unless you think the world is coming to an end.”

You get the gist. After Saturday night’s gut-check and after reading the sentiments of people who knew me back when I was a teenager, I guess I just need to woman-up and accept this is who I am…and right now, this is where I need to be. When it’s time to mix things up, I’ll know. Until then, embrace the challenge.