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Welcome to my blog!

I am Buffy, I live in Iowa with my kitty cat Meowshine and stay rather busy trying to be healthy, eating right, working out, working my full-time job and running my own custom jewelry business on the side. Thanks for coming along for the ride :)



Tuesday, March 29, 2011

6 months later and never losing hope


I just re-read some blogs I wrote on sparkpeople.com from around the time my ex left me and it really made me appreciate how far I have come. I went back to the one I wrote two days after and the comments that my sparkfriends had written in response and I could feel the pain I felt and the love they shared with me. The pain and shock scream out in those words and I can feel it again. The heaviness in my chest. The feeling that I couldn’t breath because of the weight of my life falling down around me. How I skipped around in thoughts because I couldn’t get my mind to process them in an orderly fashion. The confusion of how to reconcile the world I knew before he dropped his bomb to the aftermath my life became after. In those memories I can feel it all again.

But this time with distance. This time with pride on how far I came out of that hole he knocked me down into. This time I can look and see what I was then and how completely different I am now. That was a broken version of who I used to be. That girl was a mess and now I see how much less of a mess I am. I think I forgot the extent of the pain until I re-read in my own words how bad I felt. I think I forgot how much better I feel now until I read in my own words soaked with the pain he left behind. I can see it all so clearly now, who that broken girl was and who I am now. I can see the strength it took to keep going in spite of it all. I can see how much courage it took to keep my life going in any direction besides just staying in bed. I dealt with the things I needed to. I moved my life forward and I went on.

I was reading how I couldn’t tell my family about what happened yet because my sister was getting ready to have her baby. She and her husband had tried for so long to get pregnant and finally were. The baby was overdue and she was growing more and more impatient. I did my best to stay interested, sending texts to see how she was feeling, trying to distract her so she didn’t think about being overdue, being as supportive as I could with my world in pieces and them having no idea. Finally a few days after the bomb she was induced. I remember driving down to Des Moines to go visit her after she had the baby and I bawled and bawled on the phone to my friend Joni. I didn’t know how in the world I was going to keep it together enough for them to think I was ok. As Joni always does, she was able to snap me back into what I needed to do and keep my shit together. I look back on the pictures and I can see the pain in my face though. But somehow I plastered on a fake smile and they didn’t seem to notice. I think more then anything they were distracted enough by the happiness of the baby and how much love they had for her and all that. Thank goodness because I didn’t have a lot in me to be real convincing. I guess to me that is the epitome of doing what you have to do when life is crumbling around you. Your life might be over but the rest of the world keeps going. And you can either be dragged behind it or you can get up and go along with it. At some point you decide that you can’t let the pain kill you and you have to get your head above water. And that is just what I did. I can’t tell you how or when but at some point my life wasn’t such a struggle anymore. At some point I was more ok then destroyed. At some point I was optimistic about the future. I didn’t doubt that I would survive anymore. I knew I could do it, it was just going to take time. And here I am 6 months later and doing far better then I ever could imagine. It makes me so hopeful for the future.

It is so fitting that my niece that was born in the days following my life falling apart is named Hope. I tried hard to not lose hope in that time but it was hard not to. I even got a tattoo reminding me that “when the world says give up, hope whispers try it one more time”. I heard a really good one by Dave Ramsey today on his show “No one can take your hope, you have to surrender it voluntarily. The only one who can take your hope is you.” It reminds me of that time and how no matter how close to losing hope I was, I still believed that my life would get better. I questioned it a lot but I knew somehow I would find a way to survive it. And now that I’m not just surviving but actually living my life I can appreciate that time for what it taught me. I can appreciate going through hell because I now know what type of person I will never settle for again. I will never allow a person to treat me the way I allowed him to treat me for so long. I will never be that girl again and I only have great things to look forward to. And that feels really good :)

1 comment:

  1. So proud of you and your progress! To quote MTM..."you're gonna make it after all!"

    ReplyDelete