The Things That Await

Sometimes things happen to us that we don’t expect, don’t get to anticipate, or don’t necessarily even want.  Sometimes things happen to us that we never dared to hope for in a million years or, on the flipside, that we never wanted to have to face in a million years.  Sometimes we receive the opportunity of a lifetime or the disaster of a lifetime, seemingly so randomly as if fate decided to just flip a coin that day. I’ve never really thought a great deal about how different events impact my life; I just take the good with the bad and go on…or try to anyway. But what if one tiny decision or one supposed disaster makes all the difference? What if one meant-to-be event leads to exactly the right things, even if it’s seen as a “disaster” right now?

As we all know, I’m on a journey to find myself and what I truly want out of life, and it’s difficult. But I don’t think that I would be here right now if it weren’t for the rough summer that I had (and probably some previous events before that). I don’t think that I would even be caring about finding myself or being true to myself if I hadn’t gone through that rough time. And I’ve been struggling with getting perspective on this past summer because, well, “disasters” don’t really seem to have a reason at the time they’re happening or even after they’ve happened. They just sort of happen and leave you to pick up the pieces, pieces that you’re obviously not prepared to pick up or even deal with yet. But they’re there waiting for you while you hate them and the event that caused them until you either let them consume you…or let them go.

 And as I said, sometimes these events make all the difference.  Sometimes these “disasters” are really opportunities in disguise, opportunities to do what you’re actually meant to be doing, to do what feels right instead of what seems right.  Sometimes these “disasters” need to happen in order to help you walk confidently or even unconfidently into the unknown that will actually make you happy in the end, the unknown that will send you on a journey like I’m on, the unknown that will change your life forever.

And I’ll be honest; it’s not always easy to accept a difficult time as an opportunity. In fact, it’s really hard. But what if it’s exactly what needed to happen in order to send you on the path to true happiness?

The Naked Truth

So I made a realization while I was getting in the shower this morning…I avoid mirrors when I’m naked. In fact, it’s like a race to see how fast I can get naked and into the shower before I have to encounter the image of my naked self in the mirror above our sink. Sad, huh? And I kid you not when I say it’s like a race because I almost tripped over the side of the tub and injured myself from trying to get in there so fast this morning. Almost injured myself! (That would one hell of an injury story though…).

And you would think that this wouldn’t be any sort of surprise to me given all the other forms of self-loathing that I partake in (while clothed, mind you), but honestly, it is a surprise to me. I’m surprised that I can’t stand in front of a mirror without cringing, never mind trying to stand naked in front of a mirror without cringing. I’m surprised that I can’t stand naked in front of a mirror without homing in on all of the things that I think are “wrong” with me from my hips to my stomach to my face to my arms to my hair to my EVERYTHING. I swear the list never ends. And when standing naked in front of mirror that list just gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it engulfs me like a conflagration of self-loathing, destroying any little bit of self-esteem that I may have built up, and that’s before I’ve even had breakfast! And I’ll tell you right now…that does not make for a very good day at all.

And honestly, I’m surprised that I never noticed this until now. I mean I’ve been dealing with my naked self for like 21 years now, and today is the first day that I truly realized that I have a phobia-ish-thing of mirrors, especially when I’m naked. And, frankly, I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I want to BE NAKED and BE OK. I want to be able to face my naked self in the mirror every morning and tell myself that I am beautiful and wonderful. I want to be able to tell myself that and leave out all of the “despites.” I want to actually say something nice to myself without automatically following it with “despite the fact that (you’re fat, have almost zero hips, you have blotchy skin) or any other number of mean things that I say to myself. I just want to say something NICE and leave it at that.

So I’m going to make a goal to say something nice to myself, with NO despites, every day. Hell, I might even write them down for future reference. And I’m going to try to become chill with my naked self because honestly there is absolutely no sense in almost breaking a leg when getting into the shower just to avoid seeing myself naked. And when it comes right down to it do many of the things that I avoid doing turn out to really be that bad? No. So here’s to becoming best friends my naked self because honestly it’s LONG past due. J   

The Links That Bring Us Closer

Remember that impulse purchase that I made? Well…it’s teaching me lessons already haha. Lesson number one...make sure of the size. I was shocked when I opened the package and saw how small it was in size. Trust me…there was NO WAY that it was fitting around my wrist. So, thinking that they must have made a mistake, I went back to the website to re-check the size, and found out that the mistake-maker in this situation was without a doubt yours truly (aka…me).

So…dejected, disappointed, and truly believing that I was going to have to send back the bracelet that I really wanted but kind of spent too much for on an impulse, I decided to try to make it longer. Now I tried necklace extensions and basically every extension sort of thing that I could find in my jewelry box, but it was either too long then or still too short. And let me tell you by this time I was regretting the hell out of the purchase I had made, beating up on myself for spending so much money for it, not checking the size, and really for even buying it at all. I kept asking myself why and the heck did I buy this thing? Why did I spend so much on a bracelet that I didn’t even need just to “remind” myself that soul searching is all “about the journey?” I mean, couldn’t I just remind myself of that? And then it went from that to feeling guilty about spending the money on myself in the first place and well…it just spiraled a little out of control from there.

Then I saw a broken necklace in my jewelry box that I never wear because, well, it’s broken. And as I looked more closely at it I saw that the links on it were almost identical to the links at the end of the bracelet, and I thought,” Why don’t I just put more links on the bracelet?” And, folks, that’s what I did because apparently sometimes not even things that you order online, that you rightfully expect to fit perfectly, will fit perfectly right out of the package: and neither does soul searching. Journeys and soul searching don’t fit into the perfectly square box that I want to fit them into, sometimes they work more like the links on a chain, making you piece on one link after another until you get to the place that you really need to be. So here’s to putting links on the soul searching chain J  

Ghosts of Relationships Past

As we all know my four month alone-iversary is coming up (read previous post if you don’t know), and as I said it’s hard. It’s really hard. But I think the hardest part, at least these days, is the re-surfacing of all my old romantic relationships/situations. It’s a crazy mixture of what happened, what went wrong, what I could’ve changed, what I ignored, what I wanted them to be, what they weren’t, and even what I feel about them right now. And given my lack of romantic anything that could suck up all of my thinking time like some intense black hole, I have to think about, and God forbid, deal with these things, and frankly it sucks. A LOT. Because all of those feelings and wishes and hopes and dreams and hurts and disappointments and betrayals from those romantic whatevers are bubbling back up and saying: Look at ME! Don’t you wish you would’ve done this differently or that differently? And they’re making me deal with them in a way that I didn’t deal with them in the past, and honestly I’m kind of feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge up in here, and trust me that is not a fun or happy way to feel.

And believe me…I don’t want to have to deal with these things. I want to just sweep them under the rug or into a closet and deal with them in the rightful way that skeletons should be dealt with. But sometimes the “rightful” way, to me anyway, isn’t the healthiest way, because, well, the minute I’ve got some time on my hands, i.e. now, they jump up out of the closet and creep out from under the rug and haunt me again. And folks I am not a fan of being haunted. Not a fan at all. And as you can tell hauntings just don’t jive with my ideal of being chill and calm and all the other stuff that I want to be but have a hard time being. Because frankly, being haunted, in a strictly metaphorical sense, makes me the opposite of chill. Having to think about these things kind of puts me on edge and makes me irritable, and let’s be real here who honestly wants to take a microscope to every relationship that they’ve had? I sure as hell don’t, but it seems like these days that’s all I seem to think about, until I’m to the point of “enough already!”

Maybe this is why I keep getting into all of these unhealthy situations, because I haven’t had the guts to just face up to the fact that I don’t want to deal with these things. I don’t want to deal with the fact that I’ve been rejected before. I don’t want to deal with the fact that I make mistakes and pick the wrong and unhealthy people for me. I don’t want to deal with the fact that I HAVE been that girl who gets hurt, who gets lied to, who gets left, and who feels like an idiot at the end of the day. I don’t want to face that I’ve been that girl who has stayed in something just because she didn’t want to be alone. But the reality is that I have been that girl, and I can ignore it all I want to, but it still stands there staring me in the face as I try to avert my eyes. It still taunts me as I try to progress onward during my journey, and I feel as if these ghosts are truly holding me back with their plasma-y arms and vicious accusations. And maybe I don’t want to fully deal because then I would have to let go and, in turn, cut myself some slack, and I mean who am I going to beat up on if I can’t beat up on myself?  

Oh, The Postman...

So I’m coming up on my 4 month “alone-iversary,” and I’m kind of going insane. Ok, not really…but it is REALLY weird. Now, just to be clear, an “alone-iversary” involves romantic aloneness; I’m not chilling out on a deserted island or anything extreme like that, not that it wouldn’t be an interesting, and probably scary experience, but I just don’t see a deserted island in my near future.
 

As we all know, I’m not doing any sort of romantic anything for a year, and if it hadn’t been for a small bump in my non-romantic road I would be at month 6, but no worries, everyone has setbacks, myself included. The point of this year of no romance is to better focus on myself and who I am, of course, but also to figure out why I have such unhealthy and down-right terrible relationships. And to be honest, sifting through all of the quicksand of my romantic past is hard enough without throwing more on top of it. And as I’ve said, I’m reaching my 4 month “alone-iversary,” which is, to me, a big accomplishment. Because this is the longest amount of time that I have gone without being in some sort of romantic something. This is the longest I’ve gone without talking to or seeing someone romantically in some capacity and, frankly, it’s HARD. This romantic anything celibacy thing is WAY harder than I expected it to be, and I’m pretty surprised about that. I mean it’s just about having willpower, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought too…boy, was I wrong.

It’s about so much more than willpower, and I kid you not when I say that it is for sure one of the hardest things I have ever done. Before now, the most that I had stayed out of romantic situations was for three months and the shortest time was ten days (yeah, I know), and let’s be real here, neither of those are even close to being enough time to heal or do whatever needs to be done in order to get into another romantic anything, at least for me anyway. So it’s kind of like I’m breaking an addiction, and let me tell you month almost 4 is proving to be the most contrary.

And here’s where the “going insane” part comes in. I see attractive males EVERYWHERE. You laugh, but I am not joking. It’s like they’re stalking me, trying to get me to break my year of romantic celibacy; yes, I just said attractive males are stalking me…told you that I’m going insane. No, but for real though, I am hyper-sensitive to the presence of any remotely attractive male, like if I were a superhero that would be my superpower. And I’m fairly certain that it’s due to the fact that I’m coming up on my four month “alone-iversary;” it’s kind of like the hump before it all becomes downhill, you know? And sadly, we have possibly the most attractive postman on the planet; it’s kind of ridiculous. Postal workers should not be allowed to be as attractive as he is, especially not when I’m spending the weekend at home around my 4 month “alone-iversary;” it’s just not fair.

Now I promise that I didn’t expect to become a superhero with the superpower of being able to home in on the presence of attractive males, but I also didn’t expect my confidence to take a dip or to feel lonely either. (I know, just goes to show that no matter how much you try to prepare for something you can’t anticipate everything.) I didn’t expect to discover how much romantic attention affects my life, or how much I depend on it for things, like confidence and self-image, that I should depend on myself for. I didn’t expect to discover how much I tend to put my happiness with myself in the hands of others, specifically those of the male persuasion, instead of making my own happiness. I didn’t expect to discover how much I base my self-worth on whether or not I’m romantically involved with someone. I guess that’s what happens when you decide to be romantically celibate, huh?

So, despite, my newly acquired, and hopefully short-lived, superpower, it seems that romantic celibacy is the best thing for me right now because I’m learning A LOT from it. And instead of feeling lonely, hating Valentine’s Day, and eating tons and tons of chocolate in order to fill the void caused by feeling like a romantic leper, I’m going to be ALONE and HAPPY and celebrate the heck out of my “alone-iversary,” because it truly IS an accomplishment that I’m proud of J        

Riding the Wave

I made an impulse purchase today. It was a red, and fairly simple, bracelet with a little foot cut out of the center and the mantra “it’s all about the journey” engraved on the front. Now I don’t really make a lot of impulse purchases; I, in fact, think and think and think about purchases before I make them, and they usually get shut down before the third stage of thinking about them even rolls around. But today I bought the bracelet, even though I’ve wanted it since the summer, I bought it today.

Now as we all know, if you’ve been keeping up with my blog that is, that I am a very straight lines kind of person. I like to see everything, up close, from beginning to end and all the itty-bitty cracks in between. And the problem with soul searching and this year is that I can’t SEE that. I can’t just fast forward to the end and see the end result. And friends, that’s a difficult and incredibly frustrating thing for me. It’s difficult for me to embark on a journey and not have an itinerary. I LIKE itineraries. I LIKE to know exactly what is going to happen, and dang it soul searching just will not give into my itinerary-loving ideal.

And friends, that frustrates the heck out of me. I want to have a plan of exactly where I will end up after this journey, and frankly I don’t have one, and not having one drives me a little bit insane. I like to block everything out into the way that they will happen, and you would think that I would have learned that “blocking” things out never really ends up being the best thing, but it’s hard. It’s hard to not PLAN everything. It’s hard to not try to anticipate EVERYTHING…even when it comes to soul searching.

But the thing about soul searching is that it doesn’t come with a plan. And no matter how much I want my ducks to be in a row on this they’re going to be all over the freaking place. No matter how much I want to know the end result NOW and have a tangible strategy for my soul searching, I can’t. And it’s rough.

But honestly, all of this energy that I am expending on anticipating the “end” result (if there is one) could be spent on the journey itself. I need to stop fighting against the wave and ride with it. I need to realize that soul searching truly IS about the journey, and no matter how much I want this to be a straight line, point A to point B kind of situation, it’s not. And that’s why I bought the bracelet today instead of this past summer, because today...was the right day.

Here’s a quote that speaks to me and, well, my frustration haha:  

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
- Rainer Maria Rilke