If Life Is A Circus I Must Be The Clown

Come one! Come all! Step right up and get your ticket here to the most chaotic circus you’ve ever seen! Hear the sounds, see the sights. The main attraction of this show is not what you would think. You will see a person trying to balance on things that shouldn’t be balanced on, you will see her juggling things that shouldn’t be juggled and you will see her performing tricks that not even she imagined she should do; all for the sake of entertaining the audience.

In case you haven’t guessed, this is my life. I really don’t mind being compared to a clown. Being a clown helps me keep perspective and encourages me to allow some much needed comic relief into my life. It reminds me that not everything needs to be taken so seriously and that as long as I have the ability to laugh at myself I will always be amused but at the end of the day a clown is a clown. I do not know any clowns who are responsible for destroying an entire country’s social economic system, though some world leaders may give the impression that they are clowns from time to time. A clown will never singlehandedly destroy the environment by putting an empty water bottle into the trash instead of the recycle bin. If a clown forgets to pay the electricity bill on time they will likely eat take-out by candle light and pay the bill the following day without causing irreparable damage to their family and they will still be considered to be a good clown.

Although being a clown isn’t a bad thing it isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes I forget that I am a real too; I am a real person with real feelings that I need to accept and embrace no matter how it makes me look on the outside or how others may view me. I get reminded that I am a human only after I have taken on too much, been stretched too thin and I have come apart at the seams. Overwhelmed doesn’t seem like a strong enough word to describe how I feel. These overwhelming feelings are the result of me trying to keep up with what I thought others expected from me. I thought I was expected to be the perfect mom, the perfect daughter, the perfect employee- in short, I thought I had to be a perfect version of all things to all people. Every part of me that was REAL got pushed so far down inside that I forgot I was allowed to have feelings and opinions, I was allowed to disagree and I didn’t always have to say ‘yes’ to everything that was asked of me. My purpose in life was to act exactly as others wanted me to act and participate in everything and anything that others wanted me to participate in. By doing so, I forgot who I was, who I wanted to be and who I was meant to be because I was too busy doing things for everyone else’s sake.

I had been under the impression that the ability to multi-task was an admirable quality but when I began to look at how this presents in my life what I saw was a clown juggling brightly colored balls while riding a unicycle. I was juggling too many balls while trying to keep balance, pedaling way too fast to keep things under control. When translated, each ball represents a different responsibility I had taken on, I’m sure you are juggling more than your share too. Juggling balls are not the things that help us meet our basic needs, those are represented by the balance needed to stay on the unicycle they are the ones that we feel will help us get our higher needs met, love, esteem, belonging etc., things like coaching the footballs team, driving the car pool, organizing the bake sale, babysitting for family members and entertaining the in-laws. In most cases we don’t take on these things because we truly enjoy doing them but, just like the clown, we do them because people cheer when we do and let’s be honest it feels nice when people cheer for us. If we get our self-worth and value from these accolades we will soon be disappointed. We will drop a ball. It is inevitable because don’t forget we continue to balance on our life unicycle and when we have too many balls thrown our way we become unsteady. Instead of recognizing this and putting some balls down we continue to juggle until we become exhausted. That’s when we let our guard down, we focus too much on juggling that we don’t see the obstacle in the road. When we hit the pebble everything goes flying and we land on the hard ground, the crowd boos and eventually disburses leaving us to tend to our wounds alone. While sitting on the ground with smudged make up, a crocked wig and dirty clothes we look around and often think ‘what went wrong?’

That’s when it is time to stop and re-evaluate, to recognize what we are balancing on and then what we are juggling, decide if it’s worth juggling these things based on the value we have assigned to them and if necessary we put them down. But what if it’s too late? What if we have already fallen, how do we repair ourselves and get back up? That too is part of the re-evaluation.