Me and My Mantras or What You Least Want is Sometimes Exactly What You Need

Today I got called for a job interview tomorrow. Yay! On a reality show that's actually pretty cool. I got so excited I almost cried. It's a chick meets adrenaline kind of show. I saw it once on the airplane. I called Julie right away. I have her to thank for it. She called the supervising producer and sold me and sent my resume. And they called!! It's a rung up. Either a story assistant or story editor. So I have to be ready and centered. Thank God for the web. I looked up everything I could on the show and watched all the videos they had. Tomorrow she's giving me a little terminology tutorial before I meet so that I don't get tripped up.

Meeting on production jobs when you're a girl is odd in that you don't quite know what to wear. Production offices are casual environments. Guys can go in for interviews wearing jeans and a t-shirt. But the rules for girls are different. You have to dress somewhere in the middle. When I met on Drew, I was so overdressed. I dressed like I was meeting for a development job. I was practically wearing a suit and let's just say that was wrong. Still, I got the job. Go figure.

So in the mantra of it all (notice the title of today's blog) I decided to go to yoga tonight to decompress. I thought it would help to work out hard but as it turned out, this class wasn't what I thought it was. It was some yin flowy meditative type class. They even had a band. Okay, not a band but a guitar and some other instrument that escapes me at the moment. So the class was nothing like the one that kicked my ass yesterday even though it was being given by the same teacher. We had to hold painful poses. To teach ourselves patience and surrender. And the mantra she gave us in one particularly difficult pose was "I've arrived. I'm home." It hit me. I guess sometimes what you least want is what you need, right? I mean, I am home. And I'm trying to arrive.

I had a mantra when I was growing up - a not particularly original one - "You can do it Jody Paul." I just said it all the time over and over again when I got nervous or worried or felt like giving up. Which was a lot. Now that I think about it, that was pretty smart of me. I mean, I was a kid. Not even a self help book in sight. Now it's self help central over here. When I was young I just read magazines and books to figure out where I fit into the world. Now I pretty much do the same-- but now I'm not figuring out what to do so much as figuring out what not to do and how to change my thinking to get what I want.

Another mantra I just started is "He's just a man." Someone quite wise said that once to me about my father. And reading about codependence, a parent who rejects you and abandons you as a child and expects perfection-- dictating how you should be instead of accepting who you are and loving you for that becomes essentially a higher power aka God in your world. So in short, the more men reject me, the more they become a God. In other words, I give all men too much power. This mantra? I'm thinking I need a tattoo. But I'm not pulling a Britney. I will not shave my head. My face is a bowl. I would not look pretty without hair. Which brings me to:

The hairdresser. Well, lo and behold, he's fixing my hair. And compliments of Boundary Power, I'm realizing, what he did was all about him taking care of himself and not about me at all. He doens't know what I'm thinking. Taking care of me is my job. A job I've had for a long time, just never did right. Asking him to fix my hair was incredibly easy. I just changed how I viewed how I thought he viewed it. Why don't they teach self help instead of Psychology in high school? I guess it wouldn't matter anyway, we'd just forget everything much like I forgot statistics. And my mantra.

Okay, well now I'm off to tell myself what I need to hear and haven't been hearing for quite awhile. I'm hoping to convince myself overnight because, I think half of my problem is I have a pretty smart inner child and I think she can tell the difference when I don't believe it.