Get a life!
Yesterday I was told to get a life. To explain, a friend who had been travelling for the last month asked the seemingly innocuous question, “What have you been up to?”. To which I replied (as I have done all my life), ”Er, you know, nothing much.” “You need to get a life!”
I have never had a terrifically illuminating response to this question. I tend to shy away from talking about myself and I have no ability to hype the smallest minutiae of my everyday life to racy and fabulous sitcom/drama levels. Sometimes I think my brain forgets what I have ‘been up to’, maybe considering the elements of my daily life too unremarkable to be later regaled with great gusto. Maybe my brain stumbles at the thought of being able to succinctly distill so many discrete events into one tale to summarise What I Have Been Up To and comes up with bupkis? My husband asks me the same question everyday, and he generally gets a similarly garbled, unspecific response. Maybe I haven’t been doing anything?
But I have been doing er, you know, stuff. Life at the moment isn’t particularly exciting or remarkable. I am a new expat housewife, which in my case tends to be hanging at home, some light shopping (usually groceries) and sporadic, unconvincing bouts of housework rather than playing polo and sipping cocktails by the pool. To be honest I wouldn’t mind sipping cocktails by the pool, I just haven’t found that niche yet. I miss my friends and family, I miss my old job as a very busy event planner, I find this city difficult at worst and uninspiring at best. It is a very drawn out acclimation process. But everyday, I do stuff. Stuff which is unremarkable which, by definition, is ‘lacking distinction, ordinary’. If you break down the components of the word perhaps it could be understood as ’unable to be remarked on’. With my lifelong inaptitude at answering said question, has my whole life been unremarkable? Well, no. Not in the slightest!
I am simply no good at telling stories. I can’t tell jokes either. Groan, chagrin.
There is another dynamic. Maybe my lack of detail doesn’t fit my friends schema about what having a life should entail. This is not her problem, I have no problem with it either, it is simply a difference. She is a generous and gregarious person and I am certain it was one of those throw away comments we all utilise when not heavily invested in the conversation. But there could have been other responses surely? It just makes me think when you say to someone “Get a life.” you are in effect saying, “You should get my life. It’s better than yours.”
Over analysed? Painfully aware? Slightly defensive? You bet! Maybe I should stop worrying and get a life!
