The gift of starting over

Holy good God it can hurt but I’m here to tell you that it really can be a gift. If you let it be. You can choose to dwell on your pain and refuse to move forward or you can take the fresh start as a new beginning and do the best with what you have. You tackle it with an open heart and an open mind and even though it does hurt in the beginning, it will get better. So much better. But in the mean time, you have to find it somewhere in yourself to be brave enough to learn your lessons, accept what happened, deal with the pain in the most constructive what you can and move forward with your new life. You have to love yourself enough and want the best for yourself or you’ll make the same mistakes and find yourself stuck in a really ugly place. I’ve been there, I’ve been in total denial before, I have refused to see what was happening around me, I have been stuck and refused to follow my heart. I knew what I needed to do, I knew what was right, but I didn’t trust myself enough to listen. Being in denial doesn’t stop what’s going to happen. It only leaves you blindsided when it does happen. And angry. And pissed because you should have saw it because you should have listened to yourself and now you are just left in a massive amount of pain, confused, scared and picking up pieces. It’s a real sucky place to be. My best advice before you get to your new beginning is to start being honest with yourself. Take a step back and try to view your situation in the most honest and real light you can. Maybe talk to that friend that is willing to be honest and you just wouldn’t listen before. Listen to that nagging feeling you have and trust yourself to make the right decision for you. Know you are brave and strong and can do whatever life has for you. You can endure so much more than you think you can. For me this message provides hope when you might be in a place that there isn’t much. I hope that you know that you will come out the other side and if you try and look out for yourself, you can actually come out the other side happier than ever before. Starting over sucks and for me it was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to deal with. But I’m proud of the life that I have built since then. I might be a work in progress but I’m so proud of how far I have come. And if any of your find yourself starting over you will be proud when you look back too. It takes time, trust the process and keep getting back up. Life will knock you on your ass a lot but you have to be willing to keep getting back up. Proud and strong and never give up. Anyways, I suppose when I saw this as a pin a few days ago it got me to reflect about the last few years of my life, where I was, where I am now and how my new beginning brought me to where I am which I’m really grateful for. This gift I was given brought me to the best place I could ever have imagined. I love my life and the people in it and feel incredibly blessed to call this my life. Starting over taught me a lot of really valuable lessons that helped me get to the life I have and I’m actually grateful for that time of struggle. It taught me to love myself in a time that I didn’t feel very lovable and to trust myself to do what is best for me. It showed me all the crap I thought was acceptable that really wasn’t and what I refuse to put up with ever again. It taught me the real struggles in life and that things really could be worse. And no matter how ‘worse’ it got that I could handle it. Sometimes by the skin of my teeth and taking it second by second but I could endure whatever was thrown my way. And it made me realize you really can’t sweat the small stuff. As clichéd as that is. It taught me how strong I am and just how much I could handle. It taught me who were my true friends are and how much my family loves and supports me. It taught me to be so appreciative of what I have. I am incredibly happy that I could learn my lessons from my past and I know that allowed me to move on like I did. It allowed me to open my heart to someone more fully and allowed me to love someone so much more than I ever dreamed was possible. So the point of the post? Know that there is hope even when you don’t feel like it. That it gets easier. That this new beginning, however painful, will get better. That if you do the work, process your feelings and sort through the ugliness, that it will pay off. It did for me. I have started over so many times in my life, big and small and each time you have to believe enough in yourself that you know it will get better. Because of the changes you are making your life, your end result will be better than when you started. Besides you love yourself enough to fight for the best life you can have. You are worth that struggle to get to a better place. Embrace the gift. It's totally worth it :) The picture at the start of this post I found on pinterest and this was the link attached...

Rebuilding and summer plans

Rebuilding your life is an interesting process. When it is in pieces around you, you have no idea how or what you can piece it back together to be. I think for me it was more about leaving those pieces alone and starting new. While for a while I wanted to pretend none of it even happened, I realize soon enough the need to deal with it and accept what happened but not let it define who I was or my future. I know there are times I still struggle, especially with the anger but I know I’m really far ahead of where I could be in the grand scheme of things. In one of my classes we learned about divorce and the impact on children, how it was best to handle it, that kind of thing and they said it takes two years to get used to all the changes divorce causes. My two years will be in September and I have to tell you every day, every month I love where my life is and where it is going. It’s really not that long ago but I feel like a totally different person. I have rebuilt myself and my life into something so different from who I was. It’s an amazing accomplishment if you think about it. From the rubble you come through and thrive. Not everyone can do that and get stuck in that really dark place. I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little nervous about this summer. Since the divorce started I’ve been in school. I did drop down to one class one semester but other then that I’ve been plugging away. It’s a little unnerving to think about all the time I’m going to have on my hands and all the things I can do. I’m hoping that I have dealt enough with all the stuff that I can just enjoy my summer with the new bf and everything will super great. I guess I shouldn’t really hope because I know I have done what I can and if anything comes up I will be able to deal with it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t cross my mind though. One of the big things that has become glaringly clear to me is how much control I have in my life, even in uncontrollable situations. You have to be able to take what parts you can control and focus there. While I had no control over what was done to me, I had control over what part I played in it and what I did with the pieces after. I can be the victim or I can be my own hero. I prefer to be my own hero and make my story what I want it to be. I’m embarrassed that I spent so long in a place where I didn’t realize that, where I didn’t realize my own worth, where I stayed with someone like him and let him treat me the way he did. I’m embarrassed that he is my ex-husband as opposed to some dude I dated and when I figured out what a tool he was I let him go. But that is all in my past and I can’t change that. So you deal with the emotions as they arise and move on. The one emotion I have a hard time with is the anger. I’m so much happier without him and so much happier then I thought was possible with the new bf. But I’m angry about what he did to me. I’m angry at him for not seeing how amazing I was and all that I did do for him and not giving me enough respect to end things the way they deserved. I’m angry with myself for not seeing where this was going and ending it so much sooner. I’m angry that I made it ok for him to treat me the way he did and that I clung on to something that was so long gone or maybe that I never really had with him. I’m angry that he has done so many awful things to me and yet somehow karma has not kicked him in the nuts yet. I’m angry that I feel so angry toward him. I don’t want him to take up residence in my life or my mind at all. Having the anger seems like its keeping him in my life and I hate that. I wish awful things on him and the girl he cheated on me with and that really isn’t me. I’m a nice person, I try to be nice to everyone, I’m compassionate and kind. It’s not in my nature to hate or wish terrible things on someone. But I do on them. And I know how much of a waste of time it is. Can’t I just hope something terrible happens to them and I can never think of them again? How do I resolve the anger without forgiving or without saying it was ok? How do you get over the anger when they haven’t been punished for what they did? How do they get to destroy someone’s life and they get to be happy and ok? That just doesn’t seem fair. And maybe that is where it all lies. Life isn’t fair. I know that so well but yet we expect it to be. I guess we just have to do the best we can with what we have and hope that things turn out as we deserve. Sometimes it doesn’t but then sometimes it does. I think about the crazy amount of love I feel for the bf and I question why am I so lucky to have found that. But when I really think about the crap I’ve been through it seems almost more that maybe that is the universe throwing me a bone. Like “you have been so good for so long and got crapped on all along the way. We see how hard you are trying and here is something absolutely beautiful for your life”. Maybe it’s a reward for always trying to do the right thing, for always trying to be a good person. Finally things are going your way because you earned it, you deserve it. And maybe I need to stop questioning it. So this summer I have a lot of things I want to do and one of things I need to work through is my anger. I have to let it go and release all the ugliness that comes with it. I know that but when you have every right to feel that angry it’s hard to let it go. After all the suffering, it’s hard to just let it go. But I will. I’m determined and you see what happens when I set my mind to things. Beautiful things happen.

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 :)