Dissatisfaction

Have you ever noticed how your dissatisfaction with one part of your life can bleed into other aspects of your life? Right now I'm reading a book called How to be Cool. It's about a woman who has always been overweight, which caused her to be somewhat of an outsider. After college she took it upon herself to lose 75lbs. and basically make herself over. She thought that this amazing transformation would suddenly make her life so much better. She has a high school reunion coming up and feels that her weight loss will somehow validate her in the eyes of her tormentors. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book, but I can already tell you that she's not going to get the validation she wants. Even after all of that weight loss, she's still extremely insecure and paranoid. I believe that weight wasn't the root cause of her problem. Her dissatisfaction with her lot in life was. Teenagers are very introspective, especially those that feel like they don't fit in. Although she's 29, she hasn't grown beyond the adolescent world and what it encompasses. There's not really a single aspect of her life that she's truly happy with (not even her weight), yet she expects other people to view her in this new light. Her job is to instruct people on being cool, but deep down she feels like the most uncool person in the world.

The point is that we all should strive for self-satisfaction. We should like who we are and not worry about what other people think. That's hard to do when you're bombarded from all sides with ideals and expectations you can't possibly live up to. That's when you have to step back and ask yourself what you want and how you can go about achieving it. Just wanting it and striving for it might not always get you what you want, but it never hurts to try. If you fail, that might be an indicator that you need to go in another direction.