setting goals

When I was in high school, my mother's boyfriend, J, used to make me write a list of goals I wanted to accomplish in the next month. I was to write out a list of five or six things I wanted to do on an index card and then he would go over it with me the following month. He would also give me $50, which didn't help how I felt about this little exercise at all.

I really hated doing it. And it was much more than teenage angst or the fact that living with an alcoholic, goals were somewhat foreign to me. It was his way of getting inside my head. It was a way to control. It felt like he wanted this intimacy with me that I felt was very inappropriate. There was a lot about J that I felt was inappropriate though.

I knew better than to flat out refuse. My sister had been banished to the Garden State because she and J did not get along. Yes, ultimately it was my mother's decision, but I knew that her ability to stick to her conviction had a lot to do with J. I will never know, but I suspect that he may have put it that if my sister came back into the picture, he wasn't going to stay (not that he ever lived with us).

At first I kept it to things like school or more educational type goals. Things like read a book. He wanted something more. I tried to make up things, but J wasn't easy to fool. He had been around the block a few times. It was especially hard given, as I mentioned, having goals was a bit foreign to me. At my house the goal was literally to survive.

On some level I knew that this was probably a good thing for me to learn. And I did learn about how to make goals specific so that they would be both attainable and verifiable. For example, saying your goal is to lose weight just sets you up for disaster. For starters what does that mean? How would you know when you achieved your goal? Better to say you want to lose five pounds by the end of the month. This way you know where you are headed and when you get there.

The sad thing is that as much as I learned about goals, I think this experience added to my resistance to them - as if goal setting isn't hard enough already. I am not blaming anyone, just being making connections.

I am a list maker. I am always making to-do lists of some sort. But I find myself often avoiding writing down the tough stuff - the stuff I would rather not do. I often self-filter the things that I am afraid I will fail at.

Being aware is the first step, so I predict that I will get better at this. At least, that is the goal.


tomorrow: cherry pie! with pictures!!

on the night stand :: Lady of the Snakes