finding my own happiness in 2019

1:46pm

A few days into the New Year and I am officially back at work full-time as of today.

I’m not prepared at all, but am I ever? This year feels different. Like it should start another month from now instead of today. Oh well. I always sorta get thrown into it and hope I won’t drown. It’s cool though; I can swim just fine…or at least flop over and float for a while. ;)

So the new schedule will be Monday - Saturday with some Sundays thrown in there eventually. I think minimum I’m looking at 53 hours a week. Nothing new there. It’s just the transition is hard. I mean, going from basically nothing to over 50 hours is quite the change.

It’ll be fine though. It’ll all be fine.

Not even gonna lie, my hands are shaky right now because I saw someone who most definitely looked like TF walk into the coffeeshop next door with his son. Waiting for him to come back out to see if it’s him or just my imagination. Probably my imagination. It’s my first day back…it’s not really going to be like this is it?

Although I was thinking about him a little while ago so it wouldn’t be terribly weird. Things like that always used to happen.

Ok. It’s a couple minutes later and I already have my answer: not him. Thank God. He looked damn close though! JR happened to call and I was on the phone so I didn’t get the greatest look but yeah I’m 99% sure. hah. Looked just like him. Same build, baseball cap, facial hair, young son with super similar looks and hair. It made sense. Enough to kick up my adrenaline. Which is the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever experienced. I guess we see what we want, right?

Anyway. New year; new topics! [for the most part..I’m obviously still processing that disaster]

2019 has been good to me so far! I would really like to make this a positive year! My mental health really took a nose dive over the last four or five months. Well, to be honest, over the last couple of years. I want this year to be different though. I was in such a good place before that. Feeling free as a bird and just ready to enjoy my life on my own terms. Never in a million years did I expect to suddenly get so attached to someone. I wasn’t looking for it at all and he’d already been around for years without so much as a sly smile, so it definitely caught me off guard. And I tried to roll with it, but I just ended up getting hurt.

I’ve been thinking a lot about things over the last few weeks - trying to see how I ended up in such a terrible place. And since I’m religious I have been going to church and looking for signs. Words that will let me connect to the parts of me that have been blocked off.

For one, I don’t know if I wrote about this but I went to a nearby Mission for mass one day and the priest spoke about how people tend to torture themselves in order to repent for their sins. Like they’ll make themselves sick, or treat themselves poorly because they feel so bad for what they’ve done. Almost as if causing yourself to suffer is the only way to show how truly sorry you are. His basic moral of the story was about how we didn’t need to do that. All we need to do is be sorry and we will be forgiven kinda thing.

And I’ve been thinking about those words so much. Realizing how I have probably been doing that to myself a lot lately. Like I feel guilty for ignoring all the signs that told me to walk away from this drama with TF. I went against God and what he was trying to do with my life and I don’t know how else to show Him how sorry I am.

Honestly, I didn’t even recognize I was doing that until the words hit me.

Then, some time before the end of the year, I was lying in bed thinking about all this and suddenly it hit me that perhaps I’ve been doing this to myself for a long time. I have been subconsciously punishing myself for stuff that isn’t even my fault! And it really hit me hard when I thought about how I’m pretty sure I’ve been doing this my entire life. Ever since I was a little kid and I failed to save my dad. Except there was absolutely nothing I could have done for him. I know that without a doubt, but I have these memories in my head of how it happened and I guess wanting to have saved him. I’ve really never made that connection before.

Maybe my own guilt is what has been causing me so much pain - both emotionally and physically. Because the coincidental timing of these health flare-ups are not going unnoticed within me.

I see that I am pretty much talking about all of the same stuff here, even though I just said I wouldn’t, but I need to get this out somewhere. It’s never going to get better if I don’t consciously write it down and process.

It’s crazy to me how all of this is coming about suddenly. Is this what I’ve been waiting for? Have I really been so racked with guilt over people dying, and disappearing from my life, and various choices I’ve made, that I have been making myself sick over it? So sick that I mysteriously had this disease creep up out of nowhere and live within me for the last 12+ years? I don’t even know how to make sense of that. But it seems so plausible.

And who knows, maybe this is some new optimism within me talking. A way for me to positively make this pain go away. If it came on as a mystery there’s certainly no reason why it can’t go away as one. Either way, I want to get back to a better place this year. I want to stop torturing myself for all the things that are clearly not my fault. I want to stop punishing myself for my supposed sins.

I want to find my joy and true happiness again. For real this time. There are so many lightbulbs going off around me. So many new discoveries every day. I want to live in that goodness again. In the positivity of the world! Life is so short and I hate to waste any more of it being a depressed puddle of sadness and despair because it didn’t magically work out the way I wanted it to.

I think I will probably always miss TF - no matter how much time passes, or what changes between us, or in our own respective life situations - I’ll still miss being able to randomly feel his hand swipe over mine [gosh I still think about that a lot. what it would have been like to gently lay my hand across his face. to run my fingertips down his arm. not to mention all of the other less PG stuff ;P ] and fighting with him over the dumbest things because we’re both passionate stubborn idiots. sigh It’s for the best though. Our timing was off. We weren’t ready for each other at all.

I’m still not sure why it happened the way that it did. I didn’t want it like that. But it’s not really my place to try to make sense of all the whys and I can’t keep punishing myself for something I had very little control over. I did what I could. I know I said that I regretted the whole thing, but thinking on it now maybe I don’t. It made me happy in a way I never knew existed. For that I will always be grateful!
And perhaps that was all simply a stepping stone so I can find that same happiness within myself, without the outside influence. Maybe I can learn how to get back to that place on my own. That might be all it is in the end.

I said this thing a long time ago, back at the very beginning, about how maybe he was only coming into my life in that manner as a way to teach me how to be a grown woman. No one had ever seen me that way before or made me feel like that. I loved that side of me [something I am also hoping to reconnect to soon!].
Not just that but I haven’t been able to feel like a grown up, in general, in a long time. Living at home will mess with that balance a lot. As much as I try to establish boundaries and live my own separate life, I am still her little girl and that dynamic always comes into play. Recently, probably subconsciously fueled by TF’s comments on my being a child, I started thinking about all this. It really is true. He didn’t mean it in that way, but I haven’t been taking care of myself the way that I should. I need to start doing more on my own. I even went so far as to look into moving out but this is a small town and there were literally only 2 houses listed for rent. haha. If I could find some simple place out in the country I would move in a heartbeat. Just to get away and take care of my own stuff again. I miss being independent like that.

We’ll see. I’ll start with the things I can change, like my attitude and just doing more on my own.

My whole point here being that maybe his comments [as hurtful as they felt in the moment] actually sparked a flame in me I didn’t even realize had burnt out.

That seems as fair enough of a life lesson as I can get from someone I wanted in a million different ways.

rose.
3:55pm

p.s. I will actually come back to write about other things. This just tumbled out of me and it needed to be written anyway. I’ll be around a lot more often, what with sitting in front of a computer 40+ hours a week now. =)

Last updated January 04, 2019