At Least It's Not Fescue

I was in a weird mood yesterday. I didn't sleep well the night before, and as it tends to do, sleep deprivation made me introspective. Sometimes, introspection makes me all nostalgic. Such was the case yesterday. It was the kind of mood that gets me to sign onto Classmates.com under the pseudonymous account I've set up there (99% of the time I don't give a squirrel's nut about 99% of the people I went to high school with, and I don't want any of them to know about the 1% of the time that curiosity gets the better of me) and see if I can glean any news about the 1% of schoolmates with whom I was actually on friendly terms. It was that mood that also got me to Google the rock band of This Girl I Once Knew.

I knew This Girl in college -- my first attempt at the U of OK when I was actually college-age, not my more recent and successful return. She didn't actually go to school there, but she was the good friend of a good friend who did, and she and I were friendly by association, hanging out with the same people, going to the same parties, sometimes even hanging out with each other. She was one of those Fabulously Cool types, all cultured and well-travelled and ueber-talented and always gorgeously put together, who made me feel like a completely inadequate dork poseur. I never felt I could truly be friends with her because I felt like I could never be cool enough for her. Not that she ever said or did anything to make me feel that way, mind; she was also a genuinely sweet person with a fun and self-depracating sense of humor. But she gave such an impression of being so much more than adequate at everything she did that all I could see when I was in her presence were my own faults and how I failed to measure up.

Taking all of this into account, I should have taken her a little more seriously when she said she was going to start a rock band, and not been so surprised when it actually turned out to be somewhat successful. But you know how it is when your friend says s/he's going to start a rock band--90% of the time you both know that it's just wishful thinking, and if they do go so far as to actually assemble a group of musicians, they probably won't make it out of their parents' garage. But This Girl is someone who actually does the things she sets her mind to. Before long, she and her critically-acclaimed local band were packing up and moving to LA to be bona fide rock stars--headlining at famous LA clubs, national tours, rabid groupies, the whole works. We kept in sporadic touch via e-mail, and I tried to keep up with the band's doings, but somewhere in there we lost touch, as I had already lost touch with most of the rest of our friends from those days.

I haven't checked up on her or her band in years, or given either that much thought, until yesterday. For some reason, she was on my mind. So I plugged TGIOK's band name into Google. What I learned is that the band is now defunct. She's living in north Cali and is starting a solo career, and also has a few other creative and business ventures going. She appears to be doing well, and also appears to be even more fabulous than ever.

Somehow, this news bummed me out. Not that I'm not thrilled for her and her successes; but just as I did back in the day, I suddenly find myself using her extraordinary life as a measuring stick for my own ordinary self, and coming up wanting. She's a few years my junior, which just adds to my sense of failure and mediocrity. She's thirty now, and spent her twenties living a dream and building a great life for herself. I spent my twenties floundering and struggling to figure out how this whole adulthood thing works. She has numerous successes already behind her. I have numerous false starts behind me, with hardly any finishes. She's right where she wanted to be by 30, and I'm nowhere near where I thought I would be by the time I got to my thirties.

The grass on her side of the fence is a lush, tropical garden.

But, y'know, the grass on my side ain't so bad, either. It's Bermuda--ordinary and not that pretty, but hardy in bad weather and still very green and fun to walk around barefoot in. I may be a mediocre wannabe with vague entrepreneurial aspirations who is still struggling to jumpstart a writing career and bring some semblance of fabulousness into my life. But you know what? I still believe I'll get there. It might happen ten years later than that girl back at OU who couldn't decide whether to girlcrush on or resent the hell out of This Girl She Knew ever dreamed it would happen, but it will happen.

In the mean time, I have a pretty fantastic life. I have a husband whom I adore, and a good job that I actually like, and... okay, I'm not so thrilled with my current living situation, but that's only a few months away from improving. I have a bright future. I'm still on the way up, and all of my successes are ahead of me.

I think, what with my ADD-ish tendencies to get really excited about a new idea, tackle the implementation with all I've got and then peter out and not see it through, that I naturally get depressed when confronted with someone who actually has the drive and ability to make something out of their talents, and This Girl is, to me, the embodiment of drive and ability combined with talent and energy. But I know that I shouldn't measure my life by anybody else's. I live according to my own time-table, and I've always been a late bloomer. If it takes till my forties to finally write a book that's fit to publish, by the time I'm fifty nobody will care that it happened ten or fifteen years later than I expected. So I just need to keep writing, and stop comparing myself to other people, and remember that I love my life. It's mine and it's good and it's going places.