From the The Bodacious Book of Succulence by SARK:

“We are succulent with our shredded fantasies, our unread books, our misguided perfectionism, our hiding in bed eating rows of cookies, or neurotically running to and away from things. We are succulent just like this. Just the way we are NOW!….”

I like the way this book emphasizes that you are succulent right NOW—you don’t have to do anything special to be it (of course, I still get the “do something and you’ll finally be wonderful” message anyway!).

I had a rough weekend in which I felt overwhelmed by to-dos and “shoulds” and was crabby and snappy at my family and then extremely hard on myself about being crabby and snappy and so on and so forth in an endless spiral of ick. I have known for a long time that I honestly think that if I just read the right book and did the RIGHT thing, I would finally be PERFECT!!!! And, it just sucks when I remember…again!…that I’m not and that it isn’t possible and that the pursuit of doing it all “right,” really ends up making me less than in many respects in the end. I also feel like all the reading I do can mute my own intuition—how can I know what I truly feel and believe, if the words of 5 dozen self-help authors are chasing around inside my brain and each making the “most sense”? (I feel similarly about parenting books—I try so hard to parent the “right” way and wonder if I’ve lost touch with my own sense of what the right way is, by always reading and trying to incorporate other people’s right ways…?) Seriously, there was so much messy should in my brain this weekend I honestly could not distinguish what I really wanted to do from the shoulds—right down to, “I should be having more fun and being a more delightful person.”

P.S. The spellcheck attempted to change, “neurotically” in the quote above to “erotically.” ;-D

Tried to get a family picture of all our succulence—and, fittingly, it turned out kind of blurry ;-D