The IRS and enlightenment

I had a moment of epiphany this week. It's how I tend to work, I've found - muddling around for a while and feeling like I'll never figure anything out until one day, something clicks, and I know what to do. In this case, my moment of epiphany was triggered by someone saying something she had said 25 times before, except this time I finally realized that what she was saying was A) right, and B) blindingly obvious. There was also what we shall hereafter refer to as the Income Tax Fiasco of 2008, that was...illuminating. (I would tell you more about it, but that would make me look really really stupid.)

At any rate, I've been sitting with my last post, and knew I needed to let go, but I couldn't figure out what exactly I was holding on to. The IRS is not generally regarded as a mechanism of enlightenment, but this week, I owe my 1040 form and FICA a debt of gratitude for helping me get past my ego long enough for me to be able to hear someone state the aforementioned blindingly obvious truth about myself.

I won't go into specifics - at least not now - but it has to do with these pictures we have of ourselves and how we want our lives to go. We all tell stories to ourselves about who we are and what the world is like and how our lives are going to go. We all have to make sense of the world somehow, so our story telling is not necessarily a bad thing - unless we're into fairy tales.

I consider myself a fairly grounded person with a relatively firm grasp of life's harder realities, but I realized that there is a part of my life where I've been talking enchanted forests and fairy godmothers, things that sound comforting, but keep me from seeing that the solution is far less magical than I would like it to be.

Ironically, the real world story is a hell of a lot easier than the one that takes place in the Magic Kingdom. The only hard part is getting my ego and misplaced pride to shut up long enough to re-write my place in the story to be something both happier and less heroic, to realize that sometimes the easy way out is, in actual fact, the way out.

It's humbling to realize that sometimes I make my life WAY harder than it needs to be.

Comments

[Kori]

i know right? we make our lives so much more difficult than they are in actuality.

[HSY]

Happier and less heroic... except I still really like you, and consider you a hero.

[La La]

I always thought fairy tales were overrated. I'm trying not to make life harder for myself these days, too. Is it weird that it's hard to do that?