Background

Hi! As far as this blog is concerned, I’m Avi Lane. I’m 40 years old, and like everyone in this world, I’ve had various struggles and delights, failures and victories. When I’ve looked at the big picture of what my life looks like to me, however, I’ve seen one thread running through all the good and the bad, the times I’m happy with myself and the times I kinda think I suck. I feel like I have a lot of invisible strengths, but that my failures are all of the public variety. I have a lot that I really love about myself, it’s just not the sort of stuff that can be displayed to show how magnificently accomplished I am.

You know, people say all the time, “You can go to the gym, (clean the house, cook the food, manage the budget) you just don’t choose to. Everyone has the ability to do this thing, it’s just a matter of priorities.” The implication being, of course, that if your priorities are not ‘this thing’, that you’re failing at life and you’ve chosen poorly. The thing that gets forgotten there is that even if everyone can do anything (which also isn’t quite true) no one can do everything. I used to get so angry when people said that type of thing, because sometimes the things I had to give up to meet someone else’s priorities weren’t worth giving up to me. The beginning of everything changing for me is when I started realizing that that’s actually fine. It’s not a failure to choose invisible things like being more patient over more obvious things like a spotless house. It’s not a failure to need your house immaculate, either. It’s only a failure to give up.

Yeah, a lot of times I’m really embarrassed that everyone around me has things they’re obviously successful at, and I’m over here in the corner going, “Um… I love people! That’s a thing, right?” Sometimes that shame is paralyzing and I stop progressing for a time because I just can’t get over how much “less than” I feel like I look. Sometimes the time and effort I could have used to improve really was wasted in things that don’t matter. But in most cases, when I really sit down and talk to myself about the strengths I have and the strengths I don’t have yet, I wouldn’t trade them. I wouldn’t trade the relationship I have with my kids for a cleaner house. I wouldn’t trade really caring deep down for people for a smaller waistline.

I am not at all saying that people with clean houses have bad relationships with their kids or that the size of one’s heart and the size of one’s waistline have any kind of connection whatsoever. Just that it’s as ok to prioritize changes inside of yourself as it is to prioritize changes outside of yourself. It’s still success and it’s still growth.

Down to the point of this blog: There’s so many things “everyone” knows how to do by 40 that I just am not good at. Yet. Growth is fortunately not a zero-sum game. While we do have to choose which areas are most important, we also get to keep going every time we’ve mastered one thing, and choose another most important thing to master. I’m ready to tackle some of those obvious things and have some visible successes, and I have started this blog on the off chance that maybe not “everyone” is on top of all the things “all” adults know how to manage. Maybe I might learn something along the way that could help someone else. So! Here I am, in the middle of my life getting a new start on learning how to do all the adult things, and I’d like to share that process with you.