فصل 13

CHAPTER 13

The Lie

I’M GOING TO MARRY MATT DAMON

Laugh all you want, but this was something I believed for years. I’ve talked about my obsession with Matt Damon many times, mostly because it’s funny and I live to make other people chuckle. It’s also an easy laugh because people have a hard time reconciling a seemingly intelligent, sane person believing that she will marry a celebrity she’s never met. But the truth is, there was a time—whole years of my life, in fact—when my greatest life plan was to find Matt Damon somewhere in LA and lock it in.

I spent most of my junior year in high school watching Good Will Hunting over and over. I can still recite the entire movie for you by heart if you need me to. I applied over and over again for jobs at Miramax Films (because they had produced Good Will Hunting and my eighteen-year-old brain assumed that Matt Damon might stroll through the lobby at any given moment). For my last year living at home and my first year in Los Angeles, this fantasy of Matt as my knight in shining armor kept me going. I imagined it in vivid detail how we’d meet, what I’d wear, where we’d marry, what our house would look like, what our kids would look like . . . When I found myself in a bleak place, those imaginings were the light at the end of my tunnel. I truly believed they were where I was headed.

When I finally did bump into Matt while working a party for Miramax a year into working there, he walked right toward me at the back of the theater. I mean, hand to dog, he made a beeline for where I was standing. My heart nearly exploded in my chest because it was happening exactly the way I thought it would. He saw me and somehow just knew we were destined to be together. As soon as he got within earshot, he started to speak.

“Excuse me,” he said.

This is it! I thought.

“Do you know where I’m supposed to sit?”

He spoke to me because he was a celebrity and I was the girl with the clipboard in her hands—not because he sensed we were destined to be together. I walked him to his assigned spot and left him there without a marriage proposal or even a request for a date.

After living in LA for a year, enough reality had hit me to understand that my former imaginings were part of a childish daydream.

Later on in life I had another fantasy. This one was smaller, the outcome less life-altering, but I obsessed about it almost as much.

I wanted a Louis Vuitton bag.

More specifically, I wanted a Louis Vuitton Speedy bag.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s one of LV’s classics. It’s about the size of a regulation football, and at the time they cost a little over a thousand dollars.

One. Thousand. Dollars. For a bag the size of my head.

It was ridiculous, but I still wanted it. I wanted it because it represented the kind of woman I dreamed of becoming.

During my first summer living in LA, I often visited the Beverly Center. The Beverly Center is a fancy-pants mall in Beverly Hills, and at the time I couldn’t afford anything other than the six dollars it took to park there. Even still I would wander around window-shopping and dreaming of someday. It was on one such trip when I saw the most glamorous woman I’d ever seen—or at least, the epitome of what I hoped to look like someday. Her hair was glossy, her makeup was perfect, her outfit was cute, and in her hand she carried a Louis Vuitton Speedy bag. Even better? She’d tied a vintage scarf around the handle of that bag, making it the classiest-looking thing I’d ever witnessed in real life. In that moment I was sold on this ideal. Someday I was going to be as pulled together and stylish as that woman. Someday I was going to own that bag.

I coveted it for years knowing it was a total fantasy. A thousand dollars was an astronomical sum to spend on something so frivolous, but I still imagined what I’d do with that bag. I imagined where I’d use it and how I’d change out the scarf seasonally or to match my outfit. I pictured it in great detail, and over time I came up with a game plan for achieving it. Someday I would build a company, and someday that company would have real clients who would pay me really big money. The first time someone gave me a check for $10,000 in consultation fees, I decided I was going to buy myself that bag.

It took me years, you guys.

Years of scraping and hustling as a small-time wedding planner. Years of building up my portfolio of work and my client roster. Years of charging $750, then $1,000, then more. Every time I went to the mall I’d walk by Louis Vuitton and stare at that bag through the window. Through every meeting and contract, I held on to that vision. For every mean bridezilla or drunk best man speech or late night cleaning confetti out of the hotel carpet so my clients wouldn’t lose their deposit, I kept thinking, I’m going to get that Speedy bag!

The day I received my first $10,000 check, I drove directly to the bank—and then from the bank to the Louis Vuitton store at the Beverly Center. When I walked out of that store it was the proudest I’d ever been in my whole life.

A purse is cool, and a Matt Damon obsession is . . . er, interesting, perhaps. But why bring them up now? Why tell you about this random quirky lie or this purse I used to be obsessed with when the other chapters carry so much weight and seriousness?

Because I think my ability to imagine my dreams in intricate detail is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been able to achieve them. Seriously. Don’t rush by that statement. Sit with it for a minute. A huge part of my success is built into my imagination. And I don’t mean Tim Burton–style imagination. I just mean the ability to pick out a daydream and then focus on it . . . sometimes for years.

One of the questions I get most often is how I stay motivated. Lately I’ve been trying to offer tangible ideas surround yourself with inspiring people (both in real life and in your social media feeds); listen to motivational podcasts; blast pump-up jams until you’re feeling inspired; figure out a formula for what motivates you, then do it again and again. But that may sound like advice you’ve probably heard before, so what’s the point of repeating information that won’t stick? I’d rather hone in on what’s going to make the big difference for you, even if it might sound a little strange. For me, the big difference was envisioning a very specific future.

Believing I would marry Matt Damon was borderline crazy . . . but it got me to LA, and it led me to fighting for and getting a job at Miramax Films, which then led me to both my career as an event planner and my future husband. In the absence of clear direction or a real vision, I just imagined one. I latched on to the idea of a future so I knew a direction to walk in. Along the way I grew up and learned about my destination, but had I not held that idea in my head, who knows where I would have gone—or more importantly, how I would have mentally escaped the hard times while I was still inside of them. When I was dreaming about that purse, my larger goals of making a decent salary and contributing to the bank account I shared with my new husband seemed overwhelming. They didn’t feel tangible.

But breaking it down into a bite-sized goal—in my case, buying a purse—was achievable. Calling your shot is powerful when you’re chasing down a dream, but it’s also not enough. You have to spend real time focusing on everything you can about that dream. What does it look like? What does it feel like? How much detail can you imagine? How real can you make it in your own mind? Because here’s the deal my goals are real to me. There isn’t a single doubt or question in my mind that I can achieve them. I have absolute certainty—the same way I did with Matt or that ridiculously expensive handbag. Whether or not the dream ultimately comes true isn’t the point; the point is, how do you steer your ship in a clear direction? How do you stay on course even when the water is choppy or the boat is crashing on rocks? You do that by keeping your eyes on the horizon.

For me, my daydreams were an attempt to keep my eyes above the waves. When life was hard and murky and difficult to navigate, having a clear vision gave me something to focus on. I can’t recommend it enough for you.

Do you have a goal for yourself? I’ll tell you again write it down. No, seriously. Write. It. Down! Imagine it in intricate detail. Focus on it whenever you can. What will it feel like to get healthy? How will your clothes fit? Or how about your dream job? What will your first day at that company be like? How about the fiftieth day? What will you be able to do in your free time because you have that position? How much happier will you be? I like visuals as well. I keep my visual reminders of my current goals taped up inside my closet so every single time I get dressed (which is daily, yo) I see them as a reminder.

What are they?

I knew you’d ask.

One is the cover of Forbes with the top female self-made millionaires. The second is a picture of a vacation home in Hawaii. Both have been on my wish list for years . . . the house in particular feels extra dreamy but hard to achieve. My goal is to own it by the time I’m forty . . . so I’ve got five years.

You guys, I can’t tell you how often I’ve felt tired or discouraged or whatever, and I’ve closed my eyes and imagined my fortieth birthday party at the house in Hawaii that I’ve dreamed up. My friends, my kids, my husband, and my family are there, and we’re all drinking some fabulous cocktail. I’m wearing a gorgeous caftan of some kind . . . because when you make enough to buy your own Hawaiian vacation home, you can wear whatever you want and there’s no way I’m restricting my midsection. That birthday party and that house are crystal clear in my mind; they help me focus when I get bogged down.

Sometimes these daydreams work as a distraction technique too.

When I’m running long distance or training for a race, my imagination is a stellar tool for focusing on something else. Back when I trained for my first half marathon, my only goal was just to finish without dying. The next time around, the goal was to run those thirteen miles faster than I did the time before. That meant training often and well, doing long runs and tempo runs, and pushing myself each time. It’s hard, y’all, and it hurt muscles I hadn’t used since I did step aerobics back in the nineties!

When I run I use this trick for getting through any strenuous workout—and you are free to use it too. It’s utterly ridiculous, and even a little embarrassing, but it works for me every time.

I believe Mindy Kaling coined the phrase cardio fantasies—how she invents stories to entertain herself as she exercises. If she didn’t, someone please trademark that for me and I’ll turn it into my next book and a line of activewear.

My cardio fantasy is the big, crazy dream I typically imagine myself in during a particularly difficult workout. Sometimes the music in my headphones can get me through, but when the going gets tough, the tough (me in this scenario) imagines herself vacationing with George Clooney at his house in Lake Como.

Laugh at me all you want, but I’ve found that the more outlandish the cardio fantasy, the more time I can pass without noticing that my quads are screaming.

Don’t have your own cardio fantasy? Borrow one of mine. These are (no, seriously) my go-tos. You think I’m trying to be funny here, but I swear by the power of Grayskull, these are really what I’m thinking about

Best Friends with Your Hero. As you may or may not know, I am the biggest book nerd you’ve ever met in your whole life. Don’t even start a book conversation with me unless you really want to take it to level five, because I will embarrass myself. There’s no author on earth I want to meet more than Deborah Harkness. Because I’m a super nerd, I also know that she lives relatively near-ish my weekly running spot. I like to imagine a detailed scenario where she’s on the same trail I am and I recognize her and we basically become best friends and meet weekly to walk and discuss the intricate plot points of her next book.

Vacationing with Celebrities. I wasn’t kidding about the George Clooney thing. I like to imagine I’m part of a large collection of celebrity couples and we’re all vacationing somewhere amazing. In this same scenario my hair is always shiny and my makeup a dewy J.Lo-like special. I make everyone dinner and surprisingly, even the super-skinny movie stars like meatloaf and casseroles. They ask where they can get my cookbook, and they all love me because, for a billionaire media mogul, I’m surprisingly down-to-earth.

Singing on Stage with Lionel Richie. I have a lot of Lionel Richie on my iPod, so this was sort of a forced fantasy. At some big birthday party of mine (that fortieth in Hawaii, let’s say), Lionel is a longtime family friend who surprises me by coming to perform. At some point he pulls me up on stage and we sing together . . . I can’t actually sing well in real life, but in this scenario I crush “Dancing on the Ceiling.” Later, as an encore, we do a haunting duet of “Hello,” and years later friends will still recall, “Geez, Rachel, do you remember that one time you and Lionel sang ‘Hello’?”

Ryan Gosling or a Hemsworth Brother. I’m far too much of a weenie to have any real fantasies about these guys, but I do like dreaming about some situation where I look flawless and am so totally hilarious and witty that one of these stallions can’t help but hit on me. Propriety forces me to tell Ryan/Chris/Liam that I’m happily married, but the dream of them asking will still be with me when I’m ninety years old.

Some fantasies are instrumental in helping us reach our goals. Some fantasies are silly, but they give us something to think about. If you ask me, all of them have value. And your fantasies will be different from mine! Maybe you cure a rare disease or have dinner with Oprah. Maybe you talk politics with Roosevelt or try on dresses with Edith Head. The point is, you don’t think about the challenge before you; you keep your eyes above the waves.

So stop laughing at my nerdiness and find whatever motivation you need to get out there today and make some moves.

THINGS THAT HELPED ME . . .

1. Writing it down. I cannot stress this enough when it comes to goal setting, it’s imperative that you write everything down. Okay, maybe not your Matt Damon–related goals (I was a teenager, you guys!), but if you’re dreaming of something for yourself, physically writing down the words is a powerful thing to do.

2. Saying it aloud. Naming your goals is also important, because often we struggle to even admit them to ourselves. Make sure when you name yours, you do it in a powerful way. Say, “I am getting my master’s in organizational psychology” instead of “I will try to go back to school.” I drive around town saying my goals in my car where no one can hear me. I announce them like proclamations . . . as if it’s only a matter of time before they happen.

3. Creating a vision board. The pictures inside my closet hold a lot of meaning for me. They’re a constant reminder of where I want to go, and a visual aid can be really helpful for those of you who don’t feel like your imagination is strong. Use someone else’s visuals to help you map out your dreams in your mind.