On Starting Over

Man oh man, I'm my best friend. 

Finding the secret to loving your heart if you've never really learned to is a liberating and soul-warming experience. It's also painful and scary as fuck.

This year was an animal that I never expected my eyes to meet. Remission of a serious disease is something that I waited three long years for. Now that it's finally here, figuring out what to do with myself has been even more trying than dealing with the illness itself.  I lost parts of me that I'm not happy to admit to losing, and feel as though I failed someone who came into my life only to care for and love me by taking too long to heal. Feelings of guilt for being sick, as wrong as they may be, are a pretty serious, and pretty common problem for anyone living with a chronic illness. It delays all healing. All of it. It makes more problems than you could imagine for yourself. And if you've got any emotional issues prior to that, you definitely start to feel as though you've been kicked in the grapes just too many times to get up and learn to feel good again. 

So what do you do?

You start over.

You start over in every way. And it fucking kills. But if you're beating yourself up about things that you've had no control over, you're not getting anywhere. You'll never forgive yourself if you don't stop blaming yourself. That's a fact. Stripping your spirit down to reassess your value doesn't sound like a walk in the park, and it isn't. I don't want to start life at 30, I can't even lie about that. Most of my posts are geared toward sickies [and not so secretly, to myself], but this is something that can apply to anyone with heart-shaped baggage. So, you know... probably anyone who reads this. 

I've never quite been here before, but I consider myself extremely lucky to recognize this time in my life as simply the beginning of another process that I'm excited to have been presented with.

While painful wrecking balls came through my heart and tore down walls that I built to keep real love out because it terrified me, because I thought that I didn't deserve it, they also allowed me to finally watch myself grow into a listening and forgiving, wide-eyed learner... and I'm so very happy to let the new chapter begin.

I'll finish this note with gratitude, respect, acknowledgement, courage and love. Because that's all any of us are after, and right now, I feel absolutely nothing else.

<3

Flutter Moment

I have what I like to call 'Flutter Moments'.  These moments usually take me by surprise when I am in desperate need of smiling.  It never fails.  I could be, and usually am, having the most horrifying day when these moments choose to arise.  I was walking to catch the bus to work a couple of days ago with a friend, (Any 57 bus line riders in Boston are aware of this terrible mode of transportation) when I caught myself heading into the Bitter Barn with the thought of being without a mate during wintertime.  Even the Penguins I see at the Aquarium have someone.  For life.


Then, I looked down.

This is what I saw.

(If you are a romantic, this rock is lovely to you.)

I smiled, reached for my little white Smartphone, and clicked.  Alone time is AMAZING.  And as I laughed to myself about how the Universe must label me an ignoramus, I realized that had I been wrapped up in someone else... the chances of my missing this sign would be great.  I guess I'm just saying, that small moments that make your heart flutter, are sometimes even more powerful than the effect of someone else's.