I'm coming in late to 2018. On New Years Day I got strep and due to stubbornness, a weak immune system, stress, and working more than resting, I relapsed hard and was in bed for the first 15 days of January 2018, including those beautiful snow days. But I'm back and I'm ready to make the traditional New Years changes. I'm gonna pretend to eat paleo for a month, (okay, a week), talk about going to the gym, and make a bottle of wine last three nights instead of two (but hey, I'm up from a bottle a night so there's already progress). Kidding! Kidding . . . .
I'd love to give you all of these exciting updates on my life, but considering I haven't been very active or exciting, I've got nothing thrilling to report except that I'm moving. Yet again. Three times in a year. A new record. I'm staying in the general vicinity of East Nash, but downsizing a bit. The only perks to downsizing are a gas stove and a beautiful and perfect front porch overlooking the downtown skyline along with a nice biking neighborhood and an easy walk to plenty of local amusements and cafes.
Sine last I posted I've seen friends be hospitalized, been a stranger to my own family, struggled immensely with an inhumane work environment, spent a Christmas in a whirlwind of emotions and broken relationships, and I was just asked to write a piece for an online magazine based on the term, "Things are Okay."
My first thought was, "but things aren't okay." And then I realized that's why they have to be okay. My whole life I've felt sorry for myself. My parents divorced before I was born and my mom bailed when I was a kid. I grew up in a broken home of parents yelling and fighting pretty much every night. My sister and my two step-sisters and I would sit at the top of the stairs most evenings and listen to them scream for hours. They thought we were tucked in bed, like their hurling insults couldn't penetrate through the paper thin walls. Those were the nights my father didn't bring his anger upstairs with him when he tucked us in, to hurl at us instead of my step-mom for a change, which also happened quite often. My father was primarily responsible for the yelling. While he does not truly believe in mental illness and especially not in himself, as it is a weakness to his manhood and his faith and ability to provide, he is manic bipolar. He hates that I am a feminist and the irony is that his degrading treatment of my stepmother and the women in my family is what fired my lust for equality and grew my zeal to be outspoken whenever possible about the normalized mistreatment of women. But I digress. My father and I have a better relationship now than we once did, and as he ages he has also watched me struggle through mental illness and I believe has more of an understanding and sympathy to it now. All of that to say, my life has been filled with the antithesis of what we are taught is the American dream, and that's just the cliff notes.
But wait, here I am talking about feeling sorry for myself and the paragraph literally turns into a pity party. It is so engrained in me to only recognize sorrow in my life because that is my norm. It's what I'm used to. What I feel I deserve. Where I place my worth. But isn't it time I started seeing the exceptional? To stop complaining about the mental and emotional and even physical toll my job is taking on me and instead say, "I have a steady job and a salary I can depend on and that's more than many can say." Instead of crying about broken relationships and familial disintegration, I can take stock of my incredible, and let me repeat: INCREDIBLE friends and be thankful for the family they have given me? Instead of letting it bother me that I am about to pay more money every month to leave a huge and beautiful and perfectly located home that I love to move to a smaller one further out, I can be overjoyed that I have a home, a roof over my head, and the ability to pay rent each month?
I need to learn that even when I don't think I'm okay, I am in fact, okay. How does one change their thought process of almost 29 years? I did it once before with mental illness, and while I stumble constantly and have many, MANY falls that take a very long time to rise from, I do rise. And that is something. I have the desire to rise, and that is everything.
And I have the desire to be okay. And so I will try, again and again, to curb my thoughts to the positive and how it effects me over dwelling on the day to day that is enough to grind anyone down.
Hopefully I will be better about writing my thoughts down for accountability, and in doing so become better and better with each admission of guilt and negativity. In the mean time, I'm going to compromise. I'm going to simultaneously break and keep my New Years goals (not promises or resolutions, because those are just asking to be broken and they hold you to an impossible standard that makes you feel even shittier when you break them). I am going to have a glass of wine at 3 in the afternoon because it is one of my rare days off, but I am also going to make a paleo dinner and do some writing. So I'm gonna call that a win for today. Tomorrow is another day, and to quote Anne Shirley, "tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet." And that is incredibly uplifting to me.
Good luck, everyone. You're okay. And if you aren't right now, you will be.
In the meantime, I'm here, and we can chat if you want. I'm a good listener I think/ hope.