The A Team

“Greed is an ugly thing, love and respect are much more important.”

Despite my love/hate relationship with Twitter, I do so enjoy reading some of Ed Sheeran’s tweets. Not only is this man an amazing singer/songwriter (Lego House is pretty much my favourite song in the entire world right now), he’s got a lot of interesting things to day.

I often think about my desire to run the universe. Someone very dear to my heart used to joke that I could conquer small nations using only my tenacity and force of will. I’ve always wanted to do everything, be a mom, have a career (or two, or five), be a partner, a friend, etc. In short, be everything. I guess that’s a form of greed; the desire to succeed at everything. I tried being a perfect girlfriend and that didn’t turn out so well. I try to be the perfect mother, but then I become the horrible housekeeper. I try to be the perfect housekeeper and I become the horrible student. No matter how hard I try to be the perfect something, I end up making a mess of everything. I place my job over my interpersonal relationships to the point where I often joke that I am married to my job. Plans will get moved, things will change at a moment’s notice and my job will dominate conversations. While my career is not financially rewarding, I guess I’m still greedy on the level that my career outweighs everything that is not my children.

But that’s how it works with everyone, we place career and monetary satisfaction, the desire to accomplish our goals over our own need for love and respect from the people that love us most. We try to so hard to be perfect, to be successful that when we fall short of these goals, we tear ourselves down and hurt everyone around us. I know it hurts those around me to hear me bawl my eyes out when I look at my life and the pile of schoolwork and the looming deadlines and the mess in my bathroom and I wonder “Why can’t I do anything right?” We neglect the truly positive influences in our life and cast them aside in favour of sycophants who will tell us what we want to hear in favour of truly loving and supporting us because we are simply too selfish to make room for love and respect. We want it our way, when we want, how we want and when we don’t get our way, we throw a tantrum and walk away and throw oursleves back into work and the pursuit of success in favour of finding the balance.

There is nothing wrong with wanting success. If there was, then I’m screwed, as most of my life is spent trying to build a successful career (sometimes I even succeed). But when we are sacrificing the things that truly matter, which is that we have love and respect, then we are truly poor. Deep down, I know I could live happily as a SAHM in a cardboard box with my girls and the right partner. That doesn’t make me want to succeed any less. I guess it’s about finding and maintaining balance between wanting it all and keeping what we really need.