#NOMOREGOALS

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and throw out my list of goals

From my mid-twenties until just before the pandemic, I started each year with a list of goals clearly listed in the front of my daybook. Throughout each year, I would keep a tally of those I had achieved and even some successes I hadn’t seen coming. Many of the goals were professional. As an actress, I aimed to get onto a television show; as a writer I hoped to get published. “Sell three articles” I wrote several years in a row. There were also travel goals (“Kenya!” “Egypt!”). And I often aspired to make a specific amount of money. There were also items like, “Pedicure every month” and “Get teeth fixed” and “Change name to Dana” and later, “Change name to Natasha” (don’t ask).

As I had children, I would also add “Children happy and healthy”. The degree to which I determined whether they had met this mark was completely unscientific and subjective -- I only found this out later – from them -- when they started individuating.

I also wrote a list of people that I wanted to see more of and become closer to. I am cripplingly shy, so I made very little progress in this regard. I would group these people into possible dinner parties, along with a possible menus, that I almost never had. And many, many times these groupings would carry over from year to year. To this day, very few people have had my peach and prosciutto salad.

For about a decade, I planned every year to start a creative salon, then chickened out at the complexity of inviting some people and not others who would know they weren’t invited because they knew someone who had.

My parents were depression babies, reared with a dreary Calvinist work ethic. If a win were to come without sacrifice or pain, it really didn’t count. Which, by the way, is why writing is financially undervalued. It looks like you’re just fucking around.

Thus indoctrinated, I never once entertained the notion that I could get something for nothing. I never played the lottery, or imagined my young self winning an Oscar for my first movie role. I never allowed myself to yearn for a thing that I didn’t have decent odds of attaining through years of hard work. This made my lists very modest and (this is only occurring to me now) made me a bit of a buzzkill to my friends who were shooting for all kinds of (to my mind) unattainable things.

To my mother, disappointment was as painful as a cancer diagnosis. Something she greatly feared until she died of it last year – I’m talking about cancer here, not disappointment. “Don’t shoot too high” “Don’t toot your own horn” were frequent admonitions and I internalized them like religion. Her religion of not wanting too much. She also often said, “Life is a bitch, and then you die” – which she told me, believe it or not, when she wanted to be comforting – petting my back and handing me a hot cup of tea.  

If there is a living embodiment of the complete opposite of “The Secret” it would be my mother. With this kind of inculcation, it isn’t surprising that I met most of my goals (my brother works in International schools so: Kenya ✔, Egypt ✔️). And modest aspirations aside, my goals list kept me moving forward – another lesson from my mother. “Keep moving forward”. I never asked what that meant because it seemed so obvious; one had to keep moving forward, didn’t one? Meeting benchmarks, bettering oneself.  A decade before she died, she told me that she always liked the feeling of something “nipping at” her heels.

And then I turned sixty at the height of the pandemic and my one and only goal became surviving without losing my fucking mind or – to be entirely honest here – without killing myself (which, not to cause panic, only occurred to me in a couple of brief dark nights of the soul).

That’s when I stopped keeping the lists.

Because there is no bigger aspiration a human can have than that they survive and do as little damage as possible. That’s it, folks! And I hit it! I knocked it out of the park! Were there set-backs? Yup. Was I always my best self? Absolutely not. Ask my family. But this became the only benchmark I cared about: Did I make it through the day without hurting myself or anyone else?

At my age, I hear a lot about Bucket Lists (#bucketlist) and I remember buying the book “1000 Places to See Before you Die” for my parents when they got to about the age I am now. So I get the idea. But last week, I watched a soccer match on TV with my husband and both my sons and that was as dreamy as any view that I could photograph with my well-manicured toes in the foreground. Afternoons like that aren’t on the list 1000 places to see before you die.

I still want to travel, live overseas, and write a masterpiece (whoops, did I say that? Don’t tell my mother – that’s way too big). I want to see my children as much as possible and I hope they end up liking me. I pray that I don’t have to nurse Pat through some tragic end-of-life scenario. But these seem more like generalized wishes than actual #GOALS. All except the masterpiece, but that’s so subjective that I could simply declare any bit of my writing brilliant and check it off the list – if I had one.

And another thing. Transferring unmet goals from last year’s list to the following one was actually a way of reminding myself of my mini-failures (remember the lists were modest). Who needs that? My big failures (the only ones that count) are written in my bones. They are the ones that molded me. Those hard, look-in-the-mirror-and-admit-to-yourself-that-you-royally- fucked-up failures. The ones that make you cover your eyes in shame even when you are alone, failures. I don’t need a list to remind me of those. They’re the ones that humbled me to the point that I had to change things about myself -- not the fact that I failed to cross off an invite to the Bergmans and Penny and Tom yet again for dinner this year. Or only placed two articles instead of three. Or didn’t get to the Grand Canyon this year. Again? God damn it!!!!

These days, I’m entertaining the radical notion that I don’t have to move myself forward at all. I don’t have to project into an ever dwindling future. The future will get here of its own accord without anything or anyone nipping at my heels. I do have, however, several fantasies of what could happen. At the top of the list is me solving a murder in a small Irish village where Pat and I are living, and then reporting it on a serialized podcast in an Irish accent that I acquired just because. This seems as likely to me as anything else.

Knowing that there are an infinite number of ways that I would feel fulfilled, loved, and excited feels oh so much better than narrowing it down to #GOALS. It makes life simpler and more beautifully complex at the same time. It makes life less a game of accomplishments and failures, and more of an adventure. Which ultimately makes it much less of a bitch.

Watching Tottenham!