Doreen Orion Blog Tour: Don’t Put Off Your Dreams

This Mental Health Notes post is brought to us by Doreen Orion, and is Day One of Doreen Orion’s Queen of the Road Blog Tour:

Hello Everyone,

I’m thrilled to guest blog on Mental Health Notes this week. Since I’m a psychiatrist and read a lot about mental health issues, I always appreciate when some humor is thrown in. I hope you all do, too, although I also hope that as I talk about the life-changing, year-long trip my husband and I took, what won’t get lost in the laughter are some of the important lessons we learned. But first, let me tell you how all this came about.

When my long-dreaded thirtieth birthday arrived, I really wasn’t as upset as I imagined I’d be, for I had achieved a much more important milestone: my sartorial centennial. I owned one hundred pairs of shoes. Then, at age forty-four, I found myself trying to cram a mere half that number into a living space of 340 square feet.

The whole thing was Tim’s fault.

When he announced he wanted to travel around the country in a converted bus for a year, I gave this profound and potentially life-altering notion all the thoughtful consideration it deserved.

“Why can’t you be like a normal husband with a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?” I demanded, adding, “I will never, ever, EVER, not in a million years, live on a bus.”

Something less than a million years later, as we prepared to roll down the road in our fully outfitted, luxury bus, it occurred to me that Tim had already owned a Corvette, long ago when he was far too young for a midlife crisis. While I pondered who he might be seeing on the side (and whether his having an affair might prove less taxing than living in a metallic phallus on wheels), I wedged and stuffed – and, oh my GOD! bent – the cutest little Prada mules you’ve ever seen into my “closet,” which was really not a closet at all, but much more resembled the cubbyhole I’d been assigned many pre-shoe-obsession years ago at Camp Cejwin. How had I let myself go from “never ever” to..this? Both Tim and I are shrinks, but he’s obviously the better one. It took him five years, yet he whittled down my resolve, no doubt with some fancy, newfangled brainwashing technique ripped out of one of our medical journals before I could get to it.

So, here is the first and one of the most important lessons we learned from “the bus thing”: Don’t put off your dreams. Tim finally convinced me by explaining, “This is just something I really want to do – while we’re young and can still enjoy it. I’ve done everything right all my life, the way I was supposed to do it. Now I want something for me. And I want it with you.”

I realized even then that he had a point. Like many people, until we reached our late thirties, Tim and I had gone through life feeling rather invincible. Not only was it inconceivable that something bad could ever happen to us, even our very mortality seemed suspect. When we hit our forties, this changed, as our contemporaries experienced sudden, unexpected tragedies: A friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. A colleague died of a heart attack in his sleep. Both of us, for the first time, could feel creaks and aches in bones we hadn’t thought about since anatomy class. Over the years, we each had treated people in our practices who had looked forward to all they planned to do in retirement, but when the time came, were too ill to travel or too devastated by the death of a spouse to live out their dreams.

Those lessons started hitting home as we officially breached middle age. We knew we were fortunate in that we would always have jobs; neurosis is a growth industry, after all. We could afford to do this now and go back to work later. For most people, it takes some terrible catalyst to change their lives. We’re living proof that it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to wait. We can change our lives NOW. And, it doesn’t have to be something as drastic as taking an entire year off. That happened to work for us, but the bus is a really a metaphor; everyone can find their own “inner bus” whether it’s taking an adult education class in something they’ve always wanted to learn about, volunteering in their communities, or rekindling an old interest that went by the wayside years ago.

What would your inner bus be?

Tomorrow, another important thing we learned: Don’t let the spark die.

© Doreen Orion

Doreen Orion is a triple-boarded psychiatrist and award-winning author. Her memoir, QUEEN OF THE ROAD: The True Tale of 47 States, 22,000 Miles, 200 Shoes, 2 Cats, 1 Poodle, a Husband, and a Bus With a Will of Its Own will be published in June by Broadway Books. For more information, go to www.QueenoftheRoadtheBook.com.

Remember! You have until May 31, 2008 to enter the Mental Health Notes Birthday Giveaway, and forever to join the This Is Why I ROCK! series!