Changing directions

I've decided to change the direction of my life and therefore of this blog.

JP and I are engaged.

This has come as a bit of a shock to my family, since most of them have only just met him. That is because ever since the Big X, I chose not to share anyone I was dating with my family, so it took nearly two years of dating before I finally decided to bring him to a family birthday dinner. I didn't know at the time (about a month ago) that we were going to become engaged, as we had not even talked about marriage yet, so I'm sure my family didn't have a clue either.

And I'm sure it has come as a bit of a shock to those who have followed this blog, since of the whopping half dozen or so posts here, two of them were negative posts about him. And you may notice that I removed those two posts.

I did that for a few reasons, not least of which is that I said yes. I have decided to make a life with him and therefore feel more protective of him than I used to and it complicates what I choose to share about him. But just as importantly, you may notice I stopped writing very often, and writing is one way I stay grounded, so I need that back. I think part of the reason I stopped is the tone I had set for this blog.

The truth is that most of the time, I am happy with JP. There's often not much to say about a part of your life that's going well. We spend most of our time at home hanging out with the pets, watching tv or movies, playing cards or Grand Theft Auto (which has become my latest guilty pleasure), etc. Sometimes we go somewhere on the weekend, like to a local vineyard or the drive-in movie theater out in the countryside.

He is good for me. He helps me be a better person--a line reminiscent of As Good as It Gets, I admit, but no less true for it. It is in large part due to the strength I find in him and his support and advice that I have become stronger at work and with my personal relationships (including with him). Which leads me to the most important reason I removed those old posts.

I have been changing the direction of my life lately and so this blog needs to reflect that.

And the final reason those posts are gone for good? I deleted them and I can't get them back anyway, even if I wanted to retrieve them to save for posterity's sake.

Stay tuned for more...

Vacation

JP (the bf) had surgery on his knee Monday to repair a torn ACL tendon so I took the week off from work to help him recover. I'm not sure I would have let myself take time off from work otherwise, and it's been really nice being away from everything.

My therapist has been giving me advice to take time for myself if I want to be alone (I always feel guilty knowing that my time could and probably should be spent catching up at work or trying to maintain relationships with friends and family, etc.); to try to consciously make decisions that will make my life easier (I seem to do the opposite for some reason); and a few other tidbits along those lines.

I kind of had a mini break-down on Friday and Saturday. The signs of this that were visible to others were when I snapped at my friend Violet and the fact that I was trying to pick fights for two days with JP. I never, never snap at people, especially my friends and loved ones. As soon as I got home from work on Friday, I also began crying any time I had five minutes alone. This made me realize that my therapist was right: I really just needed a break from everything and I needed to do some thinking about how to make my life easier.

Because it's been pretty hard lately. I've lost three close family members in the last two years; I was mugged in my own back yard last year; I've been struggling at work to earn the respect of my coworkers while trying not to piss them off, not to piss my boss off or cause her any undue stress (because it's my job to try to make her life easier, not harder), and at the same time make sure the office functions to the best of its ability despite my two coworkers sometimes just passively making my job harder by not listening to me (depsite my being more experienced) or sometimes actively making my job harder by doing the opposite of what I ask them; I've been trying to deal with an old pain visited on me as a child by a family member (a pain so deep that I have a hard time having to talk to this person years later); and now it seems that I may be losing one of my best friends because of the actions of one of those two coworkers.

So I told my family not to call and I'm doing my best to only keep up with the bare minimum of communications with the office; and my friend Violet--the one who I feel that I'm losing--well, she hasn't cared to try to contact me anyway lately, so life has been pretty peaceful. I can't remember the last time I felt this relaxed for this long.

I am thinking through things too, and may write about those thoughts. One sort of generality about my train of thought lately has been that the things we learn when we are children become ingrained in us as adults and it is worth it to reconsider the sources of those things through our grown-up eyes.

What I owe myself

Forgiveness for all the ways I've screwed myself up.  

Tolerance of my own emotions.

Acceptance of the things that are out of my control.

Confidence in my own intelligence and abilities.

Courage to set the things right that I can and should set right. 

Acknowledgment of the negative feelings I have toward myself and toward others.

Faith in my own ability to survive at least one more day.

"If you find yourself going through hell, keep going."  --Winston Churchill

Mabye the Catholics are onto something...

I got home a little while ago from my therapist appointment. She's a new therapist. I saw a therapist for a year or so after my mother was diagnosed with cancer and my boyfriend of 11 years left me. I decided soon after my mother died (July 2007) that it was time to start again, but I found excuses not to go back for a long time. Finally this summer (August--right when I spent a week at a close friend's father's home to help them deal with the sudden announcement by her mother's doctor that she was expected to die within 48 hours--I was there to help them deal with the last few days of her life, arrangements that were made after her death, etc.), I decided to get on the case and find someone. I mean, reliving her own mother's death one year later through the incredibly similar death of your friend's mother can bring up a lot of issues for a girl. So finally in the first week of December I got around to an actual first appointment.

I think this was my fourth or fifth session with her and things are starting to click between us. I was worried they wouldn't get there but they did. Today we talked about my Baby Sister. Baby Sis is in her mid-twenties, whereas I am eight years older than her. I've always felt a special closeness with her because she is the family member most like me, but our age difference always meant we didn't have a peer-level relationship. Now we are both adults and we've been dancing around how to relate to each other in this new stage of our lives. She was the only family member who knew about and read my old blog, so in that way I kept her as close to me as I could, given the emotional walls I have with everyone I know.

But she was never able to have that same confessional relationship with me. Today (well, yesterday but I just read it today) she sent me an email, the contents of which could easily have been a post on a blog like mine. It was her confessional to me. It was a broad-brush stroke of all the things you have to live with every day--all the things you have to manage to forget about for long enough to make it from the start to the end of every day.

Many people--at least the most interesting people--have these things. I try to forget that my mom is never coming back. A friend forgets that she was molested by a relative growing up. I forget the worst thing I've ever willingly and purposefully done so I can manage to feel worthy of other peoples' love and friendship. (Sorry, you don't get that worst thing this early on in the life of this blog.) A relative must try to forget that he moved halfway across the country so he could live with his husband in peace. You get the idea. I have a lot of these things, and now I've found out that my sister does too.

I am thankful to her for sharing her things with me. I am thankful to you for giving me someone to share my things with. I understand the appeal of the Catholic confessional. It's nice to tell all your things to someone whose eyes you don't have to look into. It's nice to have someone listen, to have someone else know. Just that is a help.

The Second Blog

This is my second blog--three if you count urls alone. I started my first after my mother was given a year to live and my boyfriend of eleven years had left me, after I quit my job to go back to school for my Master's and started seeing a therapist to try to straighten out the mess my life had become. I missed the writing; that is the only way I have ever been able to open myself completely.

I was in the middle of a major transition.

I find myself in the middle of another major transition and I think it's time to close the chapter of my life that is chronicled in my first blog. I think this because I can no longer bring myself to write there. So I've started my second blog.

In my first blog, I struggled with my problems with men (my fear of commitment, my fear of losing myself in someone again, of not maintaining my own life and acquaintances), my role in my mother's (lost) fight against cancer (as her primary caregiver and confidante for two years, trying to establish a life of my own not consumed by the illness), my anger at and distance from the rest of my family, and the grief over my mother's death.

I had that blog for about three years.

My mom died in July 2007. My mother's sister died in November of 2008. My mother's mother is expected to die within the next month or so. I've got all new problems with men--one in particular.