On Self Sabotage

On Self Sabotage

Amanda Sickels

As a human being,  and generally someone who likes to make excuses, I know a lot about self sabotage. I've put my head down on the pillow at night to replay my previous failings for hours on end. Each time, I tell myself that it wasn't my fault. There was nothing I could do. I blame the other people involved.

I realize that this is a part of my innately selfish nature. Any of my friends will tell you I'm a rather endearing narcissist, but this is one place where my 'me' focus creates a divide between where I am and where I want to be. I tell myself, I'm just waiting for the right conditions to thrive in.

I keep hoping that someone else will water the dry soil that I've grown roots in. I think that it's not my fault; the conditions just weren't right. I tell myself that a day will come when the conditions are perfect, and I will thrive. But that day never comes. Something happens, I make an excuse and skip out on going to the gym yet again. I tell myself that it wasn't my fault that I had a bad day.

I grant that some of the bad that I go through is not my fault. There are outside variables that contribute to the moments when I fall short of who I aim to be. But the difference, for me, between those moments being a failure and a triumph, is my attitude. The difference is whether or not I chose to let life happen or let myself live.

This applies to a lot of what is going on in my personal life. I'm working on a project, and I have a great support team who are cheering me on every step of the way, yet I struggle to push out a couple pages a week. When that team of people asks for a status update, I find that I only have an empty page and shame to report. I believe in this project. I love this story, and I know that once I finish it, I will have told a story the needed to be told. Yet, I stare uninspired at the page night after night and pretend that I am working.

I make the excuse that I am tired. I say that I'm not mentally ready to write. It's not the right time of day. I don't have enough coffee. I'm hungry. I'm stressed.

I make every excuse I can to avoid taking the personal responsibility that I owe myself.

This morning, I made no deals with myself. Instead of going back to bed, I made myself go to the gym. I could have easily spent the 2 hours it took to motivate myself into putting on gym clothes and running on a treadmill in bed. But I decided this morning that if I ever had a hope at keeping the same body size that I have now, I would have to start acting like I want it.

I'm not the thinnest person ever, but I am lucky to be petite. I am lucky that my metabolism has been able to keep up with the bad food I constantly choke it with because I would be facing a lot of health risks if I were to gain weight. My knees are bad now (I'm 22, I can't imagine what they're going to be like in 50 years), and if I ever hope to keep from replacing them in the future, I have to start building good habits now.

I have to start taking responsibility for my actions both great and small. I have to realize that while I may have one bad situation in a day, it's up to me to decide whether or not that situation is how the rest of my day goes.

I have to make a conscious decision that if I ever want to do the long list of things that I want to do, I have to do them.  This seems simple, but it takes a pep talk to make myself open up the word document and get things started. And that has to change. In reference to Hemingway, I need to remember the hunger that comes with the art. I need to feel it in my gut and embrace it, so that I can let that desire propel me into being the person I want to be.

I won't kid myself into thinking I'm gonna turn over a new leaf tonight, but I am signing a contract to myself to do these things:

Take responsibility for what I can control,

Respect my body and take care of it,

Have faith in myself.

That last one is the hardest and the steepest uphill battle, but it is the promise most worthy of keeping. For me.

Foiled Chicken and Potatoes

“Make sure you cut the potatoes thin. They’ll need to cook quickly.” Mom is directing us from out the back door as we cut the potatoes into slivers. Foil glints across the table and the other ingredients are laid out with it. 

There’s a warmth that edges in as she gives us directions every few minutes, the outside coming into our air conditioned world. My brother Brandon is on the bench, Zack is on one of the chairs on the opposite side of the table. Our table has become a paper mache of old Sunday comics and the Region sections of several newspapers. We each have a white handled paring knife in hand and it is a race to see who can cut their potatoes the fastest.

Randy, my stepdad, is downstairs in the garage and Hank Williams floats up with the sound of tools tinkering on old tractor parts. Summer time was in full sprawl and we had spent the morning weed eating and making the yard look nice. My little brothers operated the mowers while I got on hands and knees to weed my roses. Seldom did all of the members of the family come together to do anything in peace, but the times when we’d be cajoled into yard work were always good times.

After we finished trimming the yard and picking up the driveway, Mom and I would hang out the laundry. It has taken me up until adulthood to realize that my mother was born in the wrong era. She should have been born when she could hang billowy white clothes from a line in the south and a soldier in a neatly pressed uniform could have called on her. She should have been born in the roar of the twenties when she could have bobbed her hair and lived her life to the sound of jazz in a speakeasy.

We work together to clip the clothes up on the plastic green lines and I imagine that we’re wearing sundress and floppy straw hats instead of dirty tennis shoes and tank tops. It’s an automatic work that we can both do. We devise a strategy to hang out underwear behind the larger towels, because who really drives past here anyway and there’s nothing like sun warmed clothes.

The steaks would be defrosted by the time we had finished with the yard and after hanging the clothes our arms would have stopped shaking from the hour of weed whacking. Time to head in and make dinner.

There’s nothing like eating a meal that you’ve prepared. Not just throwing Hamburger Helper on the stove or making a box dinner. I mean taking the raw ingredients and shaping them into something delicious. I mean taking a bag of potatoes (the boil ‘em up, mash ‘em up, stick them in a stew kind) and frozen steaks and creating a meal that would give us a closure to a busy day.

“I think you guys have cut enough, Jesus, we’ll be eating potatoes for a week.” Mom flicks the ash of the end of her cigarette and drifts back into the kitchen with us. Outside the back door, where she operates the grill, our dog Blackie awaits scraps and another bowl of water—he’s thrown the original off of the porch in excitement.

Randy comes up the stairs and gets a cup of soda out of the fridge.

“The yard looks good, guys. Those roses look much nicer since you tidied them up, little one.” The compliment is natural and I smile as Mom gets the potatoes wrapped up in the foil. She chunks butter and onions along with salt and pepper into a foil wrap and takes them out on the porch with the steaks.

“Help your Momma get the table set.”

This part come naturally to us. Zack gets the plates, Brandon the silverware, and I survey the living room for cups that already have owners and seek out new cups for those without. Within the next twenty minutes dinner is on the table and we’re all enjoying the fruits of a day’s labor. Part of me is just glad to see that we could do things together like this. Most days are spent separate, Mom on the couch, Randy in the garage, and it felt like a rare treat for everyone to be together for something good.

The steaks are well done (I’ll find out a year later that I actually like my steak still bleeding) and the potatoes are crispy on the edges while soft toward the center of the circular slivers. They rest in a sauté of butter and spices, no onions for me, the picky eater. The foil is hot for a while, so I work on cutting my steak up while the heat and smell rises up from the potatoes.

Zack grabs the ketchup and Brandon gets more soda. My parents joke. No one is arguing over my eating habits or Brandon’s less than spectacular grades; no one is nagging on Zack for being unmotivated or slamming either parents with angry words. We’re just eating a meal. The sun is getting lower in the sky and we make plans to roast marshmallows after dinner—there’s just enough newspaper and dry wood to get a fire going in the burn barrel.

This is family. This is heaven.

***

“I’ve never made this like this before. I’m completely making this up as I go.” A couple months of living on our own has made me brave in the kitchen. I’ve improvised enough recipes that it comes naturally to me to meld together my mother’s potato recipe and one of the chicken recipes from work.

There’s not much natural light coming in to the kitchen and there’s no clothesline to hang our clothes out on, but there are several book cases and my writing desk in the living room. This is our home now. Our first home.

“Okay, baby. Is there anything I can do to help?” I shake my head no and put all of the weight of my body on the knife that I’m cutting potatoes with. It’s not a paring knife, but it will do. I offer the knife to Mike and he works at slivering the potatoes. I pull the foil out and preheat the oven. Our chicken is defrosting in the microwave.

Maroon 5 plays in the background and I sing to Mike as we put together our dinner. I throw the chopped potatoes on the foil with hunks of “tastes like butter” and season them. I add garlic in to flavor the chicken and cheese because I’m sure we could use more dairy than the dash we put in our coffee in the morning. One the chicken is diced, I mix it in with everything else in the foils and wrap them up around themselves. 

Fifty minutes in the oven and we have a hot dinner.

I don’t think about my mom in a hospital in Pittsburgh. I don’t think about her struggling to breathe as I rewrite her recipe for potatoes into a whole dinner wrapped up in silver foil.

We eat our dinner and laugh and it is just the two of us. We’re our new family.

***

Foiled Chicken and Potatoes

Servings: 2

Ingredients

4 thawed, boneless, skinless chicken breasts

2 potatoes

8 table spoons of butter (4 table spoons per foil)

1 cup cheddar cheese

Salt

Pepper

Garlic Powder

Two sheets of foil roughly 14” long

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Cut potatoes into ¼ inch slivers.

Dish out potatoes into roughly equal servings on the foil (don’t get too worried about the portioning. Eye balling it should be fine.).

Add four table spoons of butter (or butter substitute, it doesn’t matter) to the foils.

Add ½ cup of cheddar cheese to each foil.

Season potatoes with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

Dice chicken into cubes and divide evenly between foils.

Season foils again, lightly this time, with salt, pepper and garlic powder. (Aim mainly for the chicken.)

Pull the ends of the foils together and twist together until the contents are covered. Don’t worry if there are small parts where the foil doesn’t cover completely.

Place foils into a glass 13X9 pan.

Bake for 50 minutes.

Enjoy! Also, please check the chicken before consuming, I don’t want anyone to get sick!

Fuck Your Pinterest Wedding

Fuck Your Pinterest Wedding

Let me just start this out by saying that I love Pinterest. I love pinning and looking at photos and finding all sorts of things that inspire me. Pinterest is a force to be used for good to inspire and showcase the work and love of all people.

Now, I’m sure you’ve been into the Pinterest wedding tag, or perhaps you haven’t. If you have, you know that it’s a place full of great ideas on how to plan your wedding, pictures of wedding dresses and in general, a gathering of creative and innovative ideas for a wedding.

What no one tells you when you create your wedding board (your mind is full of wonder and ideas) is that this can be a bad thing. When I set out to plan my wedding, I had a few shaky ideas in mind. It was cloudy and I wanted the moon in the process, but I had a few ideas.

Since then, I have at least 3 melt downs from these feelings that I’m making a mistake with the choices in my wedding. I’m not the melt down type, but I am a perfectionist. Since creating a Pinterest, I’ve laid awake on many a night thinking that I’m ruining everything and that my wedding will be a disaster because I like things to be trim down to the details in order to create a harmony with an event such as a wedding. I want people to look at my wedding pictures and know that I was able to create an event that perfectly sums up the love that is happening between myself and the groom.

Let’s just be honest, I want to put my pictures up on Pinterest and have people pin them for ideas for their own weddings. I want the ‘oooh!’ and ‘aaaaaah!’ of knowing that I made the right choices.

This is where I’ve had to learn that I’ve gone wrong. The weddings I’ve seen on Pinterest have all been beautiful. I’ve looked at them with adoration and envy. I’ve looked at decked out ceremonies and boho brides, and I’ve wanted to do all of them. But the problem is, I haven’t wanted to do all of them because they showcase the important part of the wedding (you know… the Bride and the Groom). I wanted to do them because they’re pretty. Because they’d make good pictures. Because whatever I’m looking at (from a flowery ceremony back drop to flower crowns to ethereal wedding dresses that would never look good on my body) is most likely the latest trend in the Wedding tag.

I lost focus, between deciding flowers and color palettes, on what is important in the wedding. The fact that I’m marrying the love of my life and that all of my family and friends will be there. Things don’t have to be perfect. I don’t need to do every single DIY idea I see on Pinterest or hire a million dollar photographer for my million dollar venue (not that either of these things are bad, I just can’t feasibly afford them) to be happy.

I don’t need a Pinterest wedding to be happy. I need good food, family and friends, the dress (which I have) and, most of all, the Groom. I need to finish the wedding playlist and hire a caterer to make sure that we have something to eat. It’s not about having the best photographer or showing off the handmade decorations that I spent the summer creating. It’s about the union of myself to the coolest person I’ve met and the celebration that follows. 

Breathing Again

Breathing Again

It’s sunny. The sun. I've missed since last fall, and I feel hopeful. I’m setting out to find the post office that is supposed to be a few miles away from my apartment. No one tells you this, but moving to another state is kind of like going on vacation. You constantly rely on a fritzy GPS to get you to and from your everyday needs. The traffic around you is full of tired people who know exactly where they’re trying to go and they can’t understand why the little red car in front of them won’t speed up. The air smells weird. The geography is even different.

When I drove out to Ohio, the cradle of the Appalachian Mountains opened up into knitted green fields and red barns. Americana. My mother could make an entire room décor from the landmarks that I passed by without much thought. My mother had a congestive heart failure yesterday.

Right. The post office. I pull out of our parking lot and onto the road in front of me. The air conditioner blows cold at my face as the sun browns my bare arms. Driving seems really simply in theory, but when you’re in the middle of suburbia with a GPS that has just popped out of its carousel and into your lap, and thirty other cars trying to do the “go” thing at the same time, things get a little hectic.   

I round a wide bend and squinting ahead, I can see the post office. Home sweet USPS. I turn onto the side street, where I assume the entrance is, to see “Do Not Enter”. Well, shit. There’s an orange Jeep in front of me, and I hope that they know where they’re going.

They do. It’s just not where I want to go. The city around me sprawls in a lazy way, long bouts of highway between sporadic up sprouts of MIDAS and Sunoco’s. I pull off and relocate the post office. What they don’t tell you in driver’s education is that each city has a different way of laying out their streets. Things aren't super different but in one city where you’ll never see someone pull a U-turn, the next you’ll see it be a popular way of cross over to the other side of the street.

After re-navigation and reconsidering my attitude, I arrive at the post office. I step inside, and I’m grateful to have found the building. After the drive, the line doesn't seem so bad. I’m waiting to pick up my dress for graduation.

Graduation. Is still hasn't really hit me yet. The idea that I’m an adult now. Now what? I guess I’ll keep breathing until I figure it out. In the meantime, I work on shutting off the reminders in my brain that I have homework due or that I need to get ready to drive the four hours back to school. I don’t need to do either thing.

Graduation. The dress.

“Do you think she’ll be able to come to graduation?”

“It’s not looking too good. We’ll see what the doctor’s say. She had a congestive heart failure and she’s still weak.”

“Okay. If not, she can always watch from the live stream on her iPad.”

The postmaster calls for the next person; I move forward and give him my pink slip, and he gives me my package. I walk out to my car and consider the fact that there’s a Cracker Barrel another street over. The other Cracker Barrel, about seven miles from where I sit, was hiring. Would this one be too?

Might as well see. I pull the car back onto the four lane highway that I’m still learning to traverse and figure my way into the restaurant’s parking lot. I shut off the car and flip down the mirror. I’m not wearing any makeup. My nose ring glints in my right nostril, and I consider taking it out. I don’t.

I get out of the car, and inside is a sign that says they’re hiring.

I don’t ask the question on my mind: is she going to be okay? I stare at the heaving chest that moves at an automatic drum pace. Her head is lolled to the side and she sleeps peacefully. Sedatives will do that to you.

“She’s usually in the hospital for a couple days when this happens.” My stepdad is keeping the conversation going because he can see the storm raging inside me. He’s trying to make all of this seem normal. Just a trip to the ICU.

Nothing out of the ordinary. She’ll be right as rain, old girl, in a couple days and then things will go back to normal. I’ll pretend to be a good daughter and make promises of visits and she’ll call me from my stepdad’s phone to get mad at me for not being there. I’ll apologize and she’ll hand the phone back to Randy, her energy spent.

Application: Finished. Next, interview. The great thing about being in the same job code for the last seven years is that I can hand an application in and speak to a manager. That following conversation will be considered the first interview, because really, I’m so qualified for the position. Now, I have an interview with the GM in two days.

I set out to find the post office; I found a job.

On my way out of the restaurant, the cloud above are darkening to grays and deep blacks. I tell the woman walking beside me that it always rains when I wear this skirt. She laughs and tells me I should stop. I've never met her before, but this is the easy way of being around a restaurant. You can have conversations with complete strangers. It’s normal.

Two days and a rambling interview with a GM, I have secured a position with Cracker Barrel. A machine’s still breathing for her.