Day 18 of 30 days of following my dreams: Stop Depriving Yourself
In this solo vlog, Mary Schiller reflects on a personal experience of hesitating to buy tickets to see the USA women's basketball team at the Paris Olympics. She realizes that her delay was driven by a deep‑seated habit of self‑deprivation—believing that denying oneself desires is somehow virtuous. Drawing on a past lecture she gave on the topic, Mary declares that there is no virtue in self‑deprivation and explains how this mindset permeates everyday decisions, from diet to career choices. She shares her own transformation from "Martyr Mary," who felt unworthy of wants, to a proactive individual who gives herself permission to pursue dreams without prerequisite conditions. Mary then connects this insight to her current goals: rewriting her novel, studying French to obtain citizenship, and launching a new business offer. She urges viewers to identify where they are unnecessarily depriving themselves, to stop listening to limiting inner voices, and to act on their desires, even if failure is possible. The video ends with a call for comments and encouragement to live from a place of possibility rather than self‑deprivation.
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Hello, bonjour! It is day 18 of 30 days of following my dreams. I honestly can't believe I'm on day 18. As you can see, I'm doing this video a bit differently from the previous ones, and basically it's because I wanted to sit and talk with you about something that came up today as I'm recording this, it's about 1 PM, that relates 100% to this topic of following our dreams. And it taught me a huge lesson that I think might be very helpful for you to hear. It also relates to a topic that I actually taught a course on maybe 3 or 4 years ago. I can't remember exactly. I didn't look it up. But this topic came up in this class that I held, and it's something that I've never forgotten, except that I sort of forgot it today. A little backstory here. As you may know, the Olympics are now happening in Paris. They actually officially started yesterday, I believe. Tomorrow, the 26th, of July. Today is July 25th, 2024. Le 25 juillet 2024. Uh, and so there's lots of Olympic fever happening, and we have tickets to go to one of the track and field days, which is very exciting because there's lots of finals on the day that we got tickets for. And leading up to this morning. I was really wanting to go see the USA women's basketball team play in Lille, which is not that far from Paris. It's about an hour on a fast train from the Gare du Nord, which is maybe about, I don't know, an hour from where I live now. So, you know, All in all, a couple of hours of time. So not bad. Yet I couldn't seem to pull the trigger on getting the tickets. It would require us to stay overnight in a hotel because the game doesn't start until 9:00 PM and there weren't any late trains coming back to Paris from Lille. So that was going to be a cost. Of course, the train tickets cost money. And the Olympic tickets cost money. And I kept thinking, is it worth it? I don't know. It's just one game. But it just wouldn't let go of me. Have you ever had that happen before where you've just got this idea of something that you really want and it just won't let go of you? That's pretty much what was happening to me this morning. It just wouldn't let go. So around 11 AM or something like that, I just decided I'm gonna go to this game. That's just it. So I told my husband, I was like, I'm gonna go to this game on Monday. I wasn't sure what his work schedule was. I didn't have anything that I needed to be online for until Tuesday evening. So I was like, if we go on Monday morning-ish, early afternoon, see the game, come back fairly early on Tuesday, everything's good because I didn't need to be online until Tuesday evening. So he said, all right, let's just do this. I think he didn't want me going by myself. So we decided to get some tickets that were €50 apiece. There actually were some that were available and still are for €24 apiece, but the seating for those was not nearly as good as even the 50, and it went up from there, of course, into the stratosphere. But we can see the full court and everything, and we'll be in sort of the bottom level. So there might be a chance that maybe I could get someone's autograph. I'm going to bring a little book just in case. Would love to get some of these women's autographs. That would be amazing. And so we went through the whole process of, you know, booking the hotel and everything like that. And I realized, oh my gosh, Mary, you silly person, you, you were doing something before buying the tickets that is so ingrained in us. I don't know if it's a women thing or a generational thing or if it's just in society in general. It's hard for me to have that kind of perspective on it. But we are conditioned to deprive ourselves of what we want. It's just like so part of our psyche, if you will, that it's almost impossible to not do it. In this talk that I gave a few years ago where this was part of the discussion about self-deprivation, I said something along the lines of there is no virtue in self-deprivation. I'm going to say that one more time. There is no virtue in self-deprivation, yet it is what most of us engage in constantly. Every time we go do something that we don't really want to do, that is a form of self-deprivation. Every time we put our dreams on hold, that is a form of self-deprivation. Every time we don't do something because we are afraid of what the consequences might be and we think something horrible will happen, that is a form of self-deprivation. Now, I am someone who may be a little bit unusual. I don't know, but I have never been on any sort of diet. The only time that I ever gained weight in my life was when I was a freshman in college, which I think most people do, especially like I was living in the dorms and the food was free-flowing and whatever. But as soon as I moved out of the dorms and shifted the way that I was eating and didn't just graze all day, you know, the weight just came off. And the only other time I gained weight was when I was pregnant with my daughter, and that just Did whatever it was going to do, whatever. So I don't have any familiarity with that sort of self-deprivation, but that is a big piece of what people do, isn't it, in their daily lives? They're constantly measuring what they eat. And I'm not saying that, you know, that's necessarily a problem in and of itself, but it is definitely part of this greater societal pressure to deprive ourselves of what we want. We are told that we can't afford something, or we don't deserve something, or, you know, name the reason why we are supposed to deprive ourselves of something. If you can think of another example of that, feel free to share it in the comments with me. But it's so pervasive and so prevalent that it's hard for us to see. And as I mentioned, I got caught up in this self-deprivation thing this morning. Until I recognized it and said, oh my gosh, what am I doing? What am I doing? I'm not going to go to the Olympics in LA in 2028, at least not that I'm aware of. The Olympics are here right now. I want to see Team USA women's basketball play in person because I love all the players. Diana Taurasi and Asia Wilson. Oh my gosh. Sabrina Ionescu, Brittney Griner. You know, I want to see them play. What is going on? Why am I depriving myself of this? This is ridiculous. I'm going to confess something to you right now that I have said before publicly, but it's embarrassing. I used to really be what I call Martyr Mary. I really used to see myself from this vantage point of, oh, poor me. I don't have this. I don't have that. I can't have this. I can't have that. Horrible things have happened to me. Therefore, I must not be deserving of certain things in life. Well, fortunately, that whole perspective got wiped away almost instantly back in 2014 when I discovered a new and exciting way for me to change my life, which I have talked about at length in my books and things. But the point is, I stopped seeing myself as someone who had to curb her desires. Instead, I started to see myself as someone who could take steps towards what I want, and there wasn't any prerequisite for doing that. I think this is the other piece, is that so many times we think there is something that we have to do before we can take a step towards what we want. We think that we have to achieve something first, or we have to— I don't know what it is— we have to have something in place, or we have to do something before we can fill in the blank. It's just not true. It's absolutely not true that there is any sort of prerequisite for anything that we want in life. In the case of the Olympic basketball tickets, it was particularly silly to me when I recognized the fact that I didn't need anything except the money to pay for everything, which I had. And then I was like, why was I stressing about this so much? Why did I wait so long to follow this desire, to follow this dream, frankly, of going to see these women play basketball. And the only thing that I could think of was there are still remnants of that idea that somehow I am more virtuous for depriving myself of something that I really want, that there is some sort of gain in self-deprivation. I don't see that anymore. That doesn't look right to me. And so when I caught that, I was very happy. I was like, okay, well, at least in this instance, I managed to see what I was doing and I could correct it and follow my dream to get those Olympic tickets and go see them play basketball this coming Monday, July 29th. So this is what I want to ask you. Where are you depriving yourself where you absolutely don't need to do that? Where are you seeing that there is some sort of prerequisite for you having what you want or going after what you want? Obviously, there are certain things that we desire in life that aren't as easy to have as tickets to an event. You know, we can go online and purchase those if they're available. There are other things that take more time. But so often we stop ourselves before even taking the first step towards it because we think we don't deserve it or we think it's never going to happen or we think that, you know, well, I haven't paid my dues. So, you know, it's not going to work for me. Whatever the thought is, we can just ignore that. We can just ignore that because that isn't what matters. What matters is the desire and the force of that that is beneath the surface. And I realize that this basketball example may seem simplistic, but for me, there was a driving desire as soon as I saw that those tickets were even available a few days ago. You know, that desire had been burning and burning within me, and I finally just gave it permission to come to the fore. And that is what we need to do with all of our dreams and desires. We need to give them space to live and breathe and not see some virtue in denying them, denying that they exist, denying their power or their potency. Sometimes the sheer force of the desire or the dream is scary, right? I certainly have some dreams and desires for my life that are so powerful and are so— it's like they just encompass me fully. That I can sometimes be afraid of how powerful they are. But then I remember what that power actually is, and that power is actually what is flowing through us all the time, 24/7. It's available to us. We can tap into it. We can use it. We can allow that life force to live itself fully through us. And it's hard for me to express how much that singular idea has meant to me over the past 10 years as I have been able to make some pretty sweeping changes in my life. It's also allowed me to have— I hate to use the word hope, but I like the word hope. So I'm going to use it right here. But it allows me to have hope that anything I am dreaming about is absolutely possible for me. Like this novel that I'm working on during this 30 days, this rewrite of my novel. I think it would be easy for me to listen to the naysayers who say, well, you need to have written your first novel by age 35 or whatever, or your first novel isn't going to get any traction. No one's going to read it. Just forget about it. No one's going to be interested. It would be really easy for me to listen to all of that and think that maybe they had a point. I'm just not listening to it because, first of all, they don't know what kind of power is coursing through me, except when they see it in themselves. Of course, they have no idea what the consequences will be of writing this novel and sharing it. I certainly don't either. All I'm doing is taking it one day at a time, one word at a time, and trying to do my best with it. And yet so often we listen to these voices that say you shouldn't do this because this thing will happen or this thing won't happen. And again, it's all part of this overarching conversation around denying ourselves and depriving ourselves of what we truly want. I am not going to deprive myself of having this experience of rewriting this novel and trying to make it the best I can, I can possibly do. That is not something that I am willing to deprive myself of. Same with working on my French and trying to reach French citizenship. I am not going to deprive myself of the effort that it takes to do that. Yes, it's challenging. I'm the first to say that it is, but I'm not going to just say, well, it's not going to work out. Oh, you know, poor me. I'm I'm never going to be a French citizen. Oh, I'm never gonna, you know, whatever. I'm not going there, and I don't want you to go there either. I want you to live from this space of possibility, of non-self-deprivation. In other words, allowing yourself to go after what you want and realizing that whatever happens along the way, you will have an answer for it. You'll have a solution because you always have. So what have you been depriving yourself of? What thing or things have you been shutting off for no other reason than maybe it seems like it's what you're supposed to do, that you're supposed to deprive yourself of things, that there's some virtue in that? I know for me at this very moment, I realized that I had been depriving myself of something in my business that I really wanted. That relates to this new offer that I'm going to share, that there was a way that I wanted to work with people that I had never done before that I really, really wanted to do. And I'm willing to take the steps to make that happen, even if it fails at first. I'm not going to take that quote-unquote failure as some indication that I'm supposed to deprive myself of this. No, I am just going to keep going until it does work. And that is the way that I am striving to live my life every day, is to live from this place of inspiration and taking action from there, not listening to anything in my head that says, oh, you don't deserve that, oh, it won't happen, you know, just kind of ignoring all of that, going forward and seeing what occurs, taking the information from a quote-unquote failure, even though I don't believe in failure, as you can tell, and moving on from there. And who knows, maybe it will be a wild success from the beginning. Maybe my novel will be a wild success from the beginning. Maybe I will score really high on these French test exams and not even realize how good I am at the language. I don't know, but I'll only know if I stop depriving myself of what I want and start going for what I want. And the same is true for you. As always, I appreciate your comments. Thanks for watching. À bientôt. See you tomorrow.
