Sneak Up On Your Dreams

I have spent a great deal of time designing my life so it’s exactly how I want it, with the right balance of work, family and leisure time, but now the economic situation is making me nervous.  I wonder if I should be worrying more about money. I wonder if I should be earning more money for when bumps in the economy occur like they have now.  I’m worried that I’ll have to change my plans.

There’s no way that I could have predicted a downturn like this one. In some ways, I guess, this is the “emergency” that I’ve been planning for.  I learned that I’m supposed to have an emergency fund and be saving for retirement and to keep my debt as low as possible. I’ve done all of that. I wish I had more. I wish I had more in my emergency fund and had even less debt, but I’m in pretty good shape.  Now the problem is to not freak out and remember that my goals are still the same, I just need to keep working on things slowly.

These types of crises slow things down. What we thought we could achieve in just a couple of years will probably take longer.  I sometimes feel like there’s something wrong with me if I change my timelines.  Sometimes I have to remember that I had no control over this economic downturn and I need to try to roll with the punches.

The trick now is to breathe, make relatively safe decisions and continue doing whatever is needed to advance goals. When you get tense about world events, go back to my concept of “creative living.  Think of creative ways to manage during these hard times.

I’ve already worked on a list of what luxuries I can do without if I start earning less money.  I realize, though, no matter what, my plans probably need to change somewhat.  Remember that if there is a big problem, if you lose a job or have other difficulties, keep your eye on your goals, but revise the steps you need to take to achieve them.  Things may take longer or you may take a different path.  Doing these things is frustrating and can make us feel beaten, but try to remember to just recalculate what you need to get where you’re going, while taking into account the new circumstances in your life.

One of my most comforting exercises when I’m anxious about something is to go over the worst-case scenario in my head. This economic crisis makes me wary.  I am fine now, as I keep my debt and standard of living low, but I did start worrying for a while that the entire U.S. economy might go under.  Much of what I did in that situation is think about what I would do if that happened.  I decided I would probably organize local co-ops to trade whatever people needed and avoid the monetary economy entirely.

Currently, I’m still panicking about my job change.  I researched and learned the steps necessary to become a regularly published writer and am following those steps.  For some reason, though, I’ve recently started panicking about being successful.  Every time I send out a query, I think that the magazine may accept it and I may have to write an article.

I’m clear in my head that I’m not competent enough to write articles for national magazines.  I’ve decided that everyone in the world is more capable than I am.  It’s not even that I’m intellectually unaware of the fact that this is probably not true and that I’ve already been successfully published in local newspapers and magazines, it’s just that my emotions take over and my brain is left out.

That’s where imagining the worst-case scenario comes in.  What’s the absolutely, positively the worst thing that could happen?  I could get a publishing contract and then not be able to do the article.  I would then not get paid, the magazine would be annoyed, and that would probably be the end of it.  I’m probably not even the only writer in the world who would have done that.  It’s of course possible that I will be able to write an article and everything would be OK.

What kinds of things are your fears keeping you from doing?  What kinds of things have you decided anyone but you could do?  Try to come up with the worst-case scenario for each of these goals and see if it is dealable.  Worst case scenarios are generally not the most fun outcome of any situation, but if they’re survivable then you, at least, have tried to achieve what you want.