What's In Your Investment Portfolio?

Stocks? Bonds? Preparing for your financial future is never a bad thing (...unless you only have hours to live because that giant asteroid will be hitting a neighborhood near you any day now), but today my mind has been rotating through a different kind of investment---people. And actually, it's been an on-going mental dialogue I've been having with myself for awhile now. Who do I invest my time an energy with? Do those people return my efforts in kind? Aunt Mattie would say that we give for the sake of giving and should expect nothing in return, but seriously, who does that? Nothing in return? And where does it stop? Like, do you just keep giving until there's nothing left of you and then call it? (...Been there, done that, got the t-shirt! It sucks royally!) Having Aunt Mattie as my directional North is sometimes a wicked battle between her true goodness and my own very flawed nature. We are, she and I, often at war, although I am learning how to concede to the fact that I am not her, will never be her, and that doesn't make me a bad person...just different.

Over the course of my life I have made more than a few bad investments in people that ended up causing me great pain. Really though, most of the time my pain was self-induced, based on the unrealistic expectations of the people I was investing in, i.e. a mother who was not what my mind said mothers were supposed to be, or the young bride expecting her equally young husband to be her knight in shining armor when he didn't even know what kind of man he was going to grow up to be, himself! Talk about pressure! I remember telling my father not long ago, "It wasn't easy to learn that you aren't really the superhero of my childhood mind, just the flawed, normal man trying to do the best he can. It hurt." He laughed and replied, "Sorry about that!" It's taken me a long time to understand that some investments are worth making regardless of the return, while others are just a painful waste of time and misplaced energy. Lack of, or withdrawal from those investments doesn't have to be bitter or unkind, but we should never forget the most important investment of all...the one we devote to ourselves. I used to think that meant being "selfish". Now I know it's not the same thing at all!

Expectations still get me in trouble, whether they are of myself or projected onto someone else, but I'm getting better at shutting down that projector and accepting what I find when I truly see others for who they are rather than who I think they should be. Taking off that lens of expectation makes the entire exchange, no matter how brief, much more accurate and honest. There is a beauty in that, even when it hurts. And while I will never be a woman as selfless as Mattie was, she would have loved me anyway, flaws and all.