Yesterday, through a strange and fortunate series of events, I received an impromptu but relatively in-depth personality evaluation from a woman I’d just met. And whereas I only told her my name and birthdate, she absolutely nailed me. “You’re not cut out for a 9 to 5 job,” she said, “and you don’t like being told what to do. You’d probably do well with something musical, or the written word. You’re hung up on integrity, which means you have a good bullshit meter.” And get this shit. Then she said, “Whatever you do should have your name on it. And your picture.”

I started laughing. “I have a website with ‘me’ in the title, and I post a selfie every day.”

Now, I could go on and on about the cloth this woman said I’ve been cut from. Alas, I don’t imagine many people (other than me) would find it that interesting. Still, all day today I’ve been thinking about one particular thing she told me that I imagine many people would find interesting. Or at least useful. The thing being that I like to make things more difficult than they have to be. “You kind of enjoy the challenge,” she said. “You don’t like the easy way.”

Guilty.

Not that this information came as a big surprise. For the last almost three years I’ve blogged every day, even when I’ve been exhausted, even when I’ve been sick as a dog. You know, because I’m a hard ass, and–for some reason–swimming upstream blows my shirt up. Sometimes after I fold laundry in the laundry room, instead of carrying all my clothes into my room at once, I make several trips–one for my socks, one for my underwear, and so on. Crazy? Compulsive? Perhaps. But I’m seriously hung up on being busy/productive. Filling up every minute. “Your mind is always thinking, thinking, thinking,” the lady said. Plus–at times–I have a lot of energy, and the extra effort–the long way around the  barn–helps me burn it up.

What can I say? I like the scenic route.

Something I loved about this (accurate) personality evaluation was that it wasn’t said as a judgment. Rather, it was like, This is the way you were made. These are your strengths. These are your challenges. These are your gifts. So I haven’t been thinking of the fact that I like to make things harder than they need to be as a bad thing. When you starve yourself, food tastes better. At the same time, when part of you likes a good challenge AND another part of you believes that nothing is ever good enough, well, then you’ve got a recipe for misery. For example, for years I’ve tried, tried, tried to heal a number of physical issues all the while convincing myself that I don’t really have the resources (money, information, smarts, people) to make it happen. And yet I’ve kept trying.

Which has been about as fun as pounding sand.

The conclusion I’ve come to today is that there’s a fine line between liking a challenge and setting yourself up for misery. Like, it’s one thing to look at a big task and not be daunted, and it’s another thing to create a big task simply because it’s within your nature to tackle one. Along these lines, I’ve tried as many times as possible today to take the slightly easier route. Not necessarily the easy one, but the slightly easier one. Baby steps. For example, a while back I borrowed three books from a friend and have had it in my mind to read and return them all before this weekend. Well, I finished one book a couple weeks ago and another one today. But I decided to return the third one unread. Because it didn’t look as interesting as it did before. And I have plenty of other books to read. And–most importantly–it takes a load off my “gotta get shit done” mind.

Likewise, this afternoon I returned another unread book to the library. Screw it, I thought. This evening while working to frame a brooch, I broke a small (and rather cheap, quite frankly) frame (with obviously very little inner fortitude). And whereas I tried to glue it back together, I quickly remembered my theme for today (you don’t have to make everything so complicated) and threw it away. “I’ll just go shopping and buy another one,” I told my mom.

“But, Marcus, what if you don’t find one that’s a good as the one you threw away?”

“Well, what if I find one that’s better?”