Almost a year.
Netflix and Prime Video, on my iPad, most days.
Some days a couple of episodes. Some days three movies back to back. Some days a whole season of Law and Order SVU that I had already seen.
That last one is the one that tells me something. When I go looking for SVU, I am not looking for a show. I am looking for somewhere to hide.
I know that now.
I can count maybe ten days in the last year when I did not open one of those apps.
I ran the house. I did my workouts. The bills got paid on time. I showed up for every appointment somebody else was counting on.
From the outside I looked happy. Joyful, even. Like a woman who has it all together.
I was telling myself the same thing.
Here is what makes it interesting to me.
None of this is something I have to do. My expenses are handled. I could stop tomorrow and be perfectly comfortable for the rest of my life.
I build a business and a community called The Playground because of what it asks of me. It keeps me in the game. It lets me try things as experiments and find out. It makes me keep choosing who I want to be next, on purpose, instead of settling into whoever I already am.
What I want is a long life that I am awake for. And I want to change the way women my age think about getting older, because when one of us changes her mind about it, the people around her feel it.
That is the bigger life. And I spent a year watching other people have theirs.
Here is the part I want you to have.
I knew. The entire time.
I have the tools. I built some of them. I teach them. And I knew, on most of those three hundred and fifty five days, that keeping Netflix and Prime Video closed was the one thing that would change the results in almost every part of my life.
Knowing was never the problem.
I would feel the pull, and I would hear myself answer it.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
That sentence sounds like a plan. That is exactly why it got past me, every single time.
A plan has a future in it. It sounds responsible. It sounds like a woman who is handling it.
It is a promise about a day that has not happened yet, standing in for a word about what is happening right now.
Monday morning at 7:45 I sat down and told myself the whole truth. Out loud. For the first time.
What I found was harder than I have been wasting time.
It was never the television. It was never focus, or discipline, or a better morning routine.
What was missing was my willingness to have the result.
Because look at what happens if I close the apps and do the work.
People see me. People find me. The Playground grows, and then I have to grow with it.
And underneath that, quieter, is the part I could feel long before I could say it. To have the life I actually want, I would have to become someone I have not been yet.
Not do more. Be different.
My brain read that as danger. So did my body. Tight chest, shallow breath, and a very reasonable suggestion to watch one more episode.
I call them Brain Debi and Body Debi. Brain Debi writes the arguments. Body Debi backs them up with evidence you can feel.
They are trying to keep me inside the one I already know how to survive.
I am telling you this because I think you have your own version of it.
Maybe yours is not the television. Maybe it is the glass of wine at five. The drawer with the thing you were going to start in it. The friend you keep meaning to call. The appointment you have almost made four times.
Whichever one is yours, I have been there. I have done this before, with something harder than a television.
You know. You have known for a while.
And every time you notice it, you say something that sounds like a plan.
Monday. Next month. After the holidays. When things settle down.
Below this line is how I notice the thought and name it out loud, which turned out to be the whole difference between a year gone and a Monday morning.
The one question I ask myself first. Then the exact conversation I sat down with on Monday, with my own answers filled in. Coffee in hand, about ten minutes.
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