Quiet Reflections

I’ve felt rather quite lately.
I have had so much homework and work and feeling like I’m constantly doings something I *have* to do and I feel like my mind is slightly lost in it all. It definitely can be a wonderful thing to not think about the current state of your life and just go with the extremely busy flow. But usually by Saturday night it catches up with me and I feel this uneasy sadness that I wish I could make go away. I have friends, probably a bit too many pulling me in all kinds of directions. I have a family that has been more involved in my life the last year then in my life ever. I have lots of new nieces and nephews to ooo and ahh over and I love them to pieces. But then I ride the bus home and walk the four blocks home, and I can’t help but feel alone. As I go into my apartment and crawl into bed with my cat, I can’t help but feel alone.

The truth is this loneliness used to consume me. I hate to admit it but it did. I was absolutely boy crazy and wanting to prove some point that I was desirable and worthy of someone else’s’ affection. I suppose that is something cheating will do to you. You feel like something that is easily thrown away. Something that even after 10 years could be discarded so easily. It messes with your self worth and everything you thought you were. Well it can if you let it and I did for a while. I let that fear of being someone who wasn’t special enough or beautiful enough or good enough to want to be with, I let that fear or thought consume me. I had to prove it wrong. I finally figured out that somehow I had to let my self know that I wasn’t the problem, that the problem was him. I mean it was my fault for choosing a selfish little boy who could never care about me enough to not treat me like shit. But he’s decision to cheat and lie to me, that was all on him. There was nothing about me and who I am that made him do that; that is just who he is. I’m just the fool that didn’t see what he was capable of. But that is a story for another day.

Slowly that urge started to fade as time went by. I learned that I was ok on my own, that I didn’t need a guy in my life to make my life fun and complete. I realized that was truly in my own hands and I can choose to focus on that one tiny fact of not having that special someone in my life (that society/biology/everyone else in my life tells me that I should have and should strive for). Or I can focus on who I am becoming, how I want to live my life and who I want to surround me. I can choose to focus on what the aspects that are going awesome and let the rest fall away. I can’t control someone else being interested in me and lord knows I will never be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to be there. But I can control how I see my life and how I decide to live the life I have. It’s not easy sometimes and sometimes that loneliness tries to creep back in but I do my best to shut it down. I remind myself of how terrible my life was when I was married and how lonely I was when I was with someone. I remind myself of all the ways it can be horribly wrong and how awesome my current life is. Being with someone else doesn’t make it any less awesome.

So I have been quietly reassessing my life. Seeing where I want it to go, who I want to be beside me on my adventures and how I want to spend my free time. That is the nice thing about divorce, you get to make this new life anything you want it to be. This change is forced on you but you get to decide the end result. You can wallow in it and sulking in the shittyness that has happened or you can eventually pick up the pieces and piece together something great. It’s all a process and the great thing of being a year out is that I can clearly see some of those pieces and how I can fit them together.

Who you calling broken?

I read a quote today that said “you are not broken and do not need fixed” -Joshua Estrin
It got me thinking about the implications of viewing yourself as broken and how it would impact how you would go about living your life. I have always thought of myself as damaged, having a lot of emotional baggage and broken. And that notion implies that there is something wrong with you that needs fixed. That you aren’t whole, you are missing a part of you and you need to find/fix that missing piece. It implies that you are a victim of your circumstance and past and that inherently because of that you are no longer a complete, whole, healthy individual. Like you can’t live a happy healthy life because of something that happened in your past that you have to make better. But the truth is the past is unfixable. It is what it is. You can’t go back and change it. Instead you have to come to terms with what happened and be able to move on in a forward direction. You have to be able to accept it as a part of who you were and decide if you want it to affect who you are now. You can hold on to the past grievances and use them as justification for your brokenness and behavior or you can let them go.

And if you think about it isn’t everyone damaged/broken/maimed by things that have happened to them over the course of their life? There is no such thing as a perfect life. Hasn’t everyone had their hard times and scuffles? How is one persons’ ‘damage’ any less or more so then the next? So why do we feel damaged or broken or less than instead of just human? Human beings all go through strife and struggle. Human beings have lessons learned and become stronger from those lessons. Human beings give out their hearts and sometimes it doesn’t work out. Isn’t that all a part of being human? But can’t we thrive in spite of all that? Just because someone had a bad childhood or divorce or a loved one die or whatever hardship they suffered through, why does that somehow imply that there is no good to be found in their life after? Why does that have to mean that there is now something ‘wrong’ with them and that they are now somehow less than they were before? Doesn’t that just make you smarter, stronger, more adaptable to change, more appreciative of the good that is in your life? And if it doesn’t isn’t that the real cause for the brokenness? That you somehow couldn’t find a way to rise above the struggle and instead made it part of who you are. You can go through a trauma and it doesn’t have to break you, you can instead become stronger and better because of it. And the beauty of it all is YOU get to decide. You have the control over that part of the equation.

Everyone has a past and I think it is more what you chose to do with that past rather then what it contains, that makes all the difference. Bad things happen to people but it is how they handle those bad things that determines what kind of person they are. You cannot control what life throws at you but you can control how you react and handle what is thrown. It seems so simple to just change your mind about how you think of things but it makes all the difference in the world and it is a lot harder then it sounds. You have to start going against all that you thought was so. You have to fight against what feels like a natural instinct and change the way you see a given situation. So I decided today on my quest of getting through my emotional baggage I will no longer refer to myself as broken/damaged/not whole. I’m the same person I was before the divorce just smarter, stronger, and much much tougher. It does not define me and it will not make me a victim of that circumstance. I accept the situation for what it is and I will learn my lesson and move on. It has not damaged or broken me. I have to let something do that and I refuse.