In the blog yesterday, I was talking about that feeling of insufficiency and comparison with other people and how difficult it is to unwind from that sometimes, but then I reminded myself of the fact that everybody's life as is presented is never quite true.
And so the truth really comes out in the coffee shops and at the bars and in the fleeting conversations that you have with people when their guard is down, and they tell you that life is tricky and difficult as well, and even though it looks as if they are a master of everything, they're actually trying to grab water in the net like everybody else.
I returned to a conversation I had quite some years ago at a social event related to dentistry.
I had the chance and privilege to talk to somebody who, if I mentioned them here, you would know and you would consider to be an extremely successful individual who was highly talented and highly motivated.
The individual was a little bit drunk as we were having a conversation, but it quickly became about how difficult it was to run a business and how overwhelmed they were.
The conversation headed towards a conclusion, as the individual that I was speaking to was literally sobbing with despair about how hard things were, and I found out soon afterwards that they'd sold their business.
I'm sure that when they sold the business, they did so with a triumphant layer of how well they've done and how much money they'd made and how successful they had been and how that had always been the intention but it wasn't I'm sure. It was, as Chris Barrow always says, a 'distressed sale'.
I also heard through the grapevine (and grapevines are always terrible) that the individual's marriage was in difficulty, and then I looked at that and thought, 'I looked at you on a pedestal as somebody who intimidated me because they were so good,' but what they had done is traded off part of their sanity and part of their home humanity in order to get to where they were getting.
Isn't this always the way?
You can have something, or you can have something else, but you can never have everything and (and clearly, I'm coaching myself here) when we look at the individuals who are on a skyscraper far above us, standing on a pedestal, promoting the brilliance that they have they perhaps don't have but such a great deal of brilliance in other parts of their life.
I am fully comfortable now after my tiny wobble the other day that I will do what I can with what I have, where I am until I can't anymore.
It will be good enough or it won't but as Frank Turner says in that most iconic of songs for me "at least I f*ck*ng tried".
Blog Post Number - 3798
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