Do Y’all RememberJersey Shore?

Do Y’all RememberJersey Shore?

Anyways, I think I’m finally learning how to pay attention.

Because I do.

Actually, while writing this, I put on a Jersey Shore playlist on Spotify.

For inspiration, obviously.

And almost immediately, I remembered.

The fights. The relationships. The cheating. The friendships. I had opinions. I picked sides. I was emotionally invested in people I had never met.

Then there were the Kardashians.

Same thing.

You watch people long enough and somehow you start feeling things with them. You’re mad. You’re sad. You’re annoyed. You decide who you like and who you don’t.

And I never really questioned it.

It was entertainment.

Funny enough, I rarely watch TV now. I’ll scroll through YouTube Shorts sometimes, usually things that interest me or make me think. But every once in a while, the algorithm throws some celebrity gossip in there.

That’s how I ended up watching a video about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

They were talking about their popularity going down and literally pulled up a graph.

A whole graph.

And instead of caring about whether they were right or wrong, I found myself paying attention to something completely different.

Us.

The humans watching.

Somebody collected the data. Somebody analyzed it. Somebody made content about it. Then thousands of other people watched and formed opinions about people they’ve probably never met.

And I thought:

Wow. Humans are fascinating.

We watch. We scroll. We consume. We compare. We judge. We admire. We criticize.

We see tiny pieces of someone’s life and create entire stories about who they are.

And I’m not saying that like I’m above any of it.

Again, I have a Jersey Shore playlist playing while writing this.

I’m part of the experiment too.

I’m just noticing it now.

And I’ve been noticing a lot lately.

This week, blonde hair came up in a conversation, so I pulled up an old picture of myself from when my hair was blonde.

I looked at her for a second.

Different hair. Different clothes. Different version of me.

And I thought:

Girl.

Not in a bad way.

That was me.

There are things she did that I wouldn’t do today. Things she cared about that don’t matter as much anymore. Things she didn’t understand yet.

But how could she?

She hadn’t lived these days yet.

And somehow my brain went right back to Jersey Shore.

Those people were young too.

Except their questionable decisions weren’t sitting in an old photo album somewhere. Millions of people watched them make them.

Some of them have kids now.

Our parents had stories.

We have receipts.

Pictures. Videos. Posts. Opinions. Random moments that would’ve once happened and eventually faded into memory.

Now they can live forever.

And looking at that old picture made me realize something.

I wasn’t embarrassed by her.

I understood her.

I have information she didn’t have.

I’ve lived days she hadn’t lived yet.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of learning to step outside of yourself.

You can finally look at yourself like another human being.

And when I do that, I find it much easier to give myself grace.

Not excuses.

Grace.

I’ve had what I call social injuries.

Those moments where afterward I’m like:

Yeah. Could’ve handled that one differently.

I still trip. I still fall. Sometimes I land directly on my face.

I’m just getting better at not building a house down there.

I can acknowledge what happened. Ask myself why I reacted the way I did. Take the feedback. Learn something.

Then get back up.

Sometimes our first reaction is just that.

A reaction.

It doesn’t have to become our next action.

That little bit of space between feeling something and doing something has become really important to me.

Why did that bother me?

What am I actually feeling?

What do I know?

What am I assuming?

Sometimes the answer isn’t flattering.

Okay.

I’d rather know.

Because I can work with the truth.

And the more grace I’ve learned to give myself, the more I notice when other people don’t give themselves any.

I recognize it because I’ve done it.

Accomplish something, then minimize it.

Receive a compliment, then explain it away.

Give everyone else credit and somehow forget yourself.

When you’re inside of it, you don’t always see what you’re doing.

Now I do.

And sometimes I want to grab people and say:

Give yourself some damn credit.

But I also understand why they don’t.

I’ve been there.

That’s the strange thing about stepping outside of yourself. You don’t only start seeing yourself differently.

You start seeing other people differently too.

And maybe that’s what I’ve really been learning this week.

How we pay attention matters.

I’ve been reading Emotion by Design by Greg Hoffman, former CMO of Nike, and one of the ideas I’ve been sitting with is that we can’t always wait for creativity or inspiration to magically show up.

We have to intentionally look for it.

Which is kind of funny considering I’m sitting here writing about intentional creativity with a Jersey Shore playlist playing in the background.

I wanted to remember.

I wanted to feel something.

I wanted to connect the dots.

So I created the environment for it.

That’s creativity too.

Not waiting for inspiration.

Looking for it.

And I think wisdom might work the same way.

I ask for wisdom.

But what exactly am I expecting?

Snail mail?

A carrier pigeon?

Dear Geri, here is the meaning of life.

Maybe wisdom has been showing up the whole time.

In books.

In conversations.

In mistakes.

In things that irritate me.

In old pictures.

In my children.

Even in a random YouTube Short about Meghan Markle.

Maybe I just haven’t always been paying attention.

Because creativity isn’t only art.

Sometimes creativity is simply seeing another possibility.

Another question.

Another response.

Another way.

And that has me thinking differently about something I’ve said for a long time:

Impossible is just an opinion.

I don’t think it means pretending reality isn’t real.

Reality matters.

Sometimes things suck.

Sometimes the data isn’t good.

Sometimes people disappoint us.

Sometimes we disappoint ourselves.

Sometimes things happen that we have absolutely no control over.

I can’t positive-think my way out of every reality.

But I can ask:

Given what is true right now, what can I do from here?

Maybe I can’t change the situation.

Maybe I can change my response.

Maybe I need more information.

Maybe I need to admit I was wrong.

Maybe I need to try something else.

Maybe I need to rest.

Maybe there is another way I haven’t seen yet.

That’s possibility to me.

Not pretending the wall isn’t there.

Being curious enough to look around it.

And then, while I’m over here contemplating human behavior, creativity, attention, wisdom, and apparently the meaning of life, there’s Violet.

I had just gotten home after almost two weeks of traveling.

It was around 10 o’clock at night.

I was tired.

And she was adamant that she was going to teach me how to play Speed.

I could’ve said:

Tomorrow.

Honestly, I had a perfectly good reason.

I was tired.

But I didn’t want to miss that time with her.

So we sat down.

She taught me Speed.

She taught me how to shuffle.

And we played cards.

That’s it.

Nothing extraordinary happened.

And maybe that’s exactly why I keep thinking about it.

My life was happening.

Right there.

No audience.

No likes.

No opinions.

No popularity graph.

Just my daughter, a deck of cards, and me being there.

Actually there.

And maybe that’s what all of these completely random thoughts have been trying to tell me.

Pay attention.

Not because everything needs to become some deep life lesson.

Sometimes a card game is just a card game.

Sometimes a YouTube Short is just a YouTube Short.

Sometimes I fuck up because I’m human.

But I don’t want to be so busy watching everyone else live that I forget to notice my own life happening.

And I don’t want to spend so much time judging myself that I miss the person I’m actually turning into.

Maybe ten years from now I’ll pull up a picture of myself today and think:

Girl.

And that’s okay.

She’ll know things I don’t know yet.

Just like I know things blonde-haired me didn’t know yet.

That’s kind of beautiful when I think about it.

We’re all working with whatever information we have right now.

We’re going to get things wrong.

We’re going to change our minds.

We’re going to outgrow things.

We’re going to fall on our faces.

Hopefully, we get back up a little quicker.

Maybe we give ourselves a little more grace.

Maybe we give other people some too.

And maybe we look up from the screen every once in a while and notice what’s sitting right in front of us.

Because our lives are happening.

And I don’t want to miss mine.

Anyways, apparently I learned all of that from

Jersey Shore.

Who knew?

Impossible is just an opinion.