Why I Keep Getting in the Clown Car (And So Do You)

I don't usually remember my dreams. The other night I remembered one so specific it felt less like a dream and more like the minutes from a meeting my soul had without me.

I had a dream that I got into the elevator in my building and pressed 7. I live on the 7th floor, so this was not an ambitious request. There was also a weird neighbor, and a man yelling compliments at me that I did not ask for and would probably still think about a week later. But, let's focus on the main plot. I pushed 7.

Except the elevator didn't take me home. It took me to a bus. A bus! In my own dream, I couldn't even spring for an Uber. That bus took me across town, made questionable stops, picked up a guy who would not stop talking about his fantasy football league. Point is I was trying to go home, and somehow I ended up in a Greyhound situation.

This is, unfortunately, the most accurate metaphor my subconscious has ever produced. This one blew my recurring childhood tornado dream out of the water.

Tornado = Chaos

So obvious.

And I mean it. The director of this new dream deserves an Emmy.

I have recently started referring to such thoughts as Clown Cars. You know the thought. It pulls up. The door opens.

Honk honk. Cue the little circus horn song, you know the one, the one that plays anytime a clown car shows up anywhere.

Basically the theme is this — something or someone taking me away from myself.

The reason it's a vehicle is because it can come in many forms.

A person, a social media platform, an addiction, a habit. Sometimes it's the thought that if I could just alter my body into some finally-acceptable shape, the rest of it — the parenting, the aging parents, the whole unbearable lightness situation — would somehow get easier. As if the problem was ever the shape I'm in, and not the sitting.

Basically anything that takes us further away from the business of living in our own lives.

I'll decide it's over. Clean, decisive, done.

And then some old thought pulls up. Honk honk.

Not because there's new information. There's never new information. It's the same case I already tried, already convicted, already sentenced. But something in me wants to reopen it. Deliberate it again. Understand it even more, as if understanding it more will change the verdict.

It won't. I already know the verdict.

For a long time I thought my problem was that I liked the wrong men and I realized my problem was that I found it incredibly difficult to sit inside my own life. And for someone who has this pattern it makes sense to date complicated or difficult people because the easy ones are.. you guessed it.. rooted in their own lives.

BOOOOOORING.

The irony is that by sitting in one's own life, you're actually dealing with the problem of being alive. Kundera named it “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.”

But, why do we avoid it so damn much?

Sitting in your own life means sitting with the uncomfortable. And by uncomfortable I don't mean "my WiFi is slow." I mean the actual questions.

My kids are getting older. I am getting older. My parents are getting older. Have I lived this life to the specs of whatever I thought it was supposed to be? Will I ever find a partner, or is that a bit I'm doing for an audience that stopped watching years ago?

You know. The easy stuff.

This is why the Clown Car is so appealing. It's a rerun. I already know all the lines. There's no new information, no risk, no aging parent in it. Just a familiar plot I can drive around in for three hours instead of parking the car and walking into my actual house.

Here's the beautiful thing nobody tells you about staying in your actual life. It's not nearly as bad as you think it's going to be. The discomfort has a shelf life. It passes, usually faster than the drive would've taken.

And what you get, if you stay, is not nothing. You get to actually be invested in your own life. Sarah Blondin has called it the “Soup of your life.”

You get the whole rainbow of what it means to be a person — not just the palatable, curated colors — instead of sitting in some rerun, watching a simulation of a life that isn't happening. You also get self-trust. And you get that feeling you’ve been looking for your entire life because it’s coming from the person whom you want it from the most. YOU.

I don't say this like someone who's mastered it. I say this like someone who just, for once, wants to be home when I get home. Not halfway out the door of my own life, one foot already in some clown car.

So here's my new goal, if I even believe in those.

Next time the car pulls up.

Next time it honks.

I'm going to let it drive off without me.

This time, I’ll take the stairs.

.