Crazy, Massive, Life Document

I dated a girl like Dirt. Athletic, driven, and good-lookin’. She was a family medicine doctor. She was smart. She got a perfect score on her SAT, and I took it three times and only got points for writing my name. She was also a vegan, but mostly for health reasons, not PETA reasons. Which as a hunter was a good thing for me. Our relationship, although short-lived, didn’t exactly end for the reasons you may think.

One night we went to dinner at a Thai restaurant. We got a booth but sat on the same side. Her idea. She ordered some soy-based vegetable things for us to share. Again, her idea. I acted like they were good. They were terrible. So I figured I’d tell her a story to keep from eating another one.  She could eat while I talked. My idea.

“Leroy was just laying there.” My voice trembled as I relived the trauma while she dunked another vegetable in soy sauce. “I tried to help, but there was nothing I could do. He was helpless. Gasping for…” She put down the chopsticks, reached out her hand, picked up her phone on the table, and quickly started typing something.

“Sorry, sorry! You just made me think of something, and I didn’t want to forget,” she said with a mouth half full of curd and tofu. “Keep going. I’m listening.”

“He was just… He was just laying” I leaned over to glimpse at her screen. It was a Google doc, full of bold sub-titles and indented bullet points. Afrontted, I had no choice but to pry.

“What… what you got there?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just a document I put everything in.”

“What do you mean, everything? Like my dog fighting for his life, everything?”

“No.” she lightly chuckled. “I just remembered something I needed to do tomorrow.”

She leaned over to show me and began scrolling through the document as she continued to explain… “I keep everything in here. I started it in college and keep all my thoughts, daily tasks, and memories in it.” The college she referred to was her freshman undergrad – ten years earlier.

As she continued to scroll, I noticed the page counter on the right side of the screen – over three thousand five hundred. She was organized.

Three thousand five hundred pages of her life, documented. I can't even remember what I had for lunch, and she has every memory and meal recorded, I thought to myself. Then I thought, why would my story about Leroy dying be in her crazy massive life document?

Only Google knows what she wrote in her crazy, massive life document that night. Maybe it was something about Leroy, maybe it was something about soybeans. I tend to think it was something along the lines of, I’m super organized, and he’s super, not.

Nonetheless, every time I notice Dirt learning a new pattern, I can’t help but wonder, does he have some crazy massive life document, too?

I constantly struggle with imposter syndrome. Feeling like a fraud. Like I don’t deserve things. Even when I accomplish something worth feeling proud of, my brain will subconsciously think negatively about how I could’ve done it better or should have done it faster. I live with a bully in my head. When something fails, my first thought is always – of course it failed. I’m a failure.

Often times we bully ourselves into failure before we even set a measurement of what succeeding would look like. I can’t imagine having a crazy massive life document. All I would see are the things I didn’t accomplish.

Dirt & Mud’s happiness doesn’t operate on the scale of successes and failures. Their view of the world is binary. Avoid what feels bad. Indulge in what feels good. If their goal is to catch a ball, they enjoy chasing after it. The chase feels good. And once they catch it, they know they deserve it.

If a crazy, massive life document is your style, hey, more power to you, and honestly, I’m a tad envious. If it’s not, I’d love to tell you the rest of the story about Leroy.

Be organized, but be fulfilled.