Featured content:  IF ONLY I WERE RICH…I WOULDN’T HAVE ALL THIS ANXIETY…

Dateline:  American Airlines flight…Austin to Los Angeles

I remember a study in graduate school measuring how much effort the average person will put out to fit in with a group… The study showed that we humans are most likely to sacrifice our ideals and spend money in order to be or try to be part of a group that is slightly out of our league.  Usually, we maintain a delusion that the people in the group we wish we were a part of ….possess certain superior qualities.  Or, sillier still, we pretend they have inferior qualities….Yeah…like…rich people are all stingy and have bad marriages.

Which explains why I willingly suffocated myself… locked inside an unair-conditioned hotbox on an August afternoon when I was a fair fourteen years old. (See previous entry for full embarrassing story).

The hotbox was my hiding place when a carload of my much wealthier riding buddies popped into the hamburger joint where I was working for the summer.  I had to save my image.  Not my real image.  The facade I’d bought and paid for by working at the drive-in while my riding buddies went to camps around the nation.  Like many Americans ranking others by the expensiveness of their buying habits…In fact, some would say that the “American Dream” has become nothing more than reaching a place in life where you own (or lease) certain high dollar items.

Well, I was a 14 year old on board with the Dream.  Every Friday driving home, I stopped at the Citizens National Bank (Hardship licenses were easy to get when both parents worked and you had a job.).  There I ceremoniously deposited my check and, occasionally, a few tips left in the three table diner.  Money I was given for school clothes and school lunches also found its way into my bank account.  The ill-gotten funds I received serving as my older sister’s slave along with the change I made selling my sister and brother my desserts….Yep…straight to the bank account.

I never minded making my own money and I understood perfectly well that my parents were not equipped financially or traditionally to underwrite a horsey set lifestyle.  Ask me now and I’d say my early working independence contributed to what I’ve been able to accomplish in my life.  But, back then, it seemed incredibly  important to hide how I was different from my friends, how I scraped together money to fund my horse habit while their wealthier parents from wealthier parents rolled horseshow bills into the family budget without a hiccup.

Just how well does the buying-expensive-stuff method of trying to feel better inside your chest cavity…actually work?  The method is certainly popular.

But, here’s the truth.  Your own free psychological heads up.

Imagine you are in small clearing in a forest…feeling very anxious, though you don’t know exactly why.  You are desperate to find a solution to your anxiety.  Extending like spokes out of the clearing are trails, one of which leads back home.  Let’s make “home” self-esteem, or self-acceptance.  Some of the trails are unadorned and some are marked with neon signs and arrows screaming at you at the rate of 3000 times a day:  This is the road home!  Take this trail!  Just pay shipping and handling.

Most of the time when I can be helpful to an anxious person…including the one in the mirror…I am helpful not because I can point the person to the trail out of the forest …but because I know some of the tempting trails that don’t work out.  Trying to find someone to love you enough so that you will love yourself, that one is a dead end.  The chosen supply-giver turns out to have a life of his own he needs to attend to.  Not to mention, our chosen self-esteem provider turns out to be very hard to train.  The buy-your-way-out-of-anxiety trip is another recipe for disappointment.

You are not your butt size.  (Now you can stay wandering around in that delusion your whole, magazine-buying, label-reading, daily-weighing life…or start smiling right now…your choice.)   You are not what you drive.  You are not your address.

Just in case you’ve read the psychologist’s heads up and are tempted to see where other people are … in case anyone from Austin was on the flight, he or she could see how important I am….