Anecdotes

Things aren't always what they seem. We say it all the time, but how often do we really mean it?

I was sitting in my therapy session on Friday, talking about next steps in my life, paying good money for advice that should have come for free as a child, when my therapist stopped and looked at me with a sort of inquisitive look and said "For how brave you are, you're also a wimp." My first thought was Thanks. My second thought was I'm paying you how much and you're just now figuring this out?

Is it still courage if it is survival? To get to the sort of life I believe would justify the last 26 years of BS, I know any sort of lackluster bravery I have exhibited in the last few years will only be the tip of the iceberg. That's exhausting to think about.

I find anecdotes the easiest way to express what words fail to fully express, so here are a few to complete the picture of what a day in the life of a 26 year old woman that can't seem to get ahead.

I have been struggling to find a church and with the past few months of a rebirth of faith, this is fairly sad for me. The only thing that truly makes me tick, community, seems to be the one thing I am adrift in. So in the least, I have been attending a small group every other week, actually enjoying the company of the women. Thursday I got an email it was ending. It's been going for five years. Seriously?

Friday I had a conversation with one of the owners of the company I work for. I have known him for almost four years, but never through the current company. My boss (after five months of me working here) just discovered this and asked him if he recommended me for the job. He told me he said no. They asked him why and he said well because "I didn't know she had applied for the job and I would never have thought she would want to do this." They obviously asked him why, he replied with "Well, I'm pretty sure she's overqualified to be picking up your dry-cleaning. In fact, I thought you were talking about a different person," followed by an awkward silence.... I'm not sure if I'm more offended he said he wouldn't recommend me, or that my boss' don't know I'm not a moron.

As part of my therapy (or just need to not sit on my ass), I have been baking. A lot. Pumpkin spice cake, chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting, cherry and lemon scones with devonshire cream, cinnamon buns from scratch... you get the point. And it's all good. Except for a few hiccups in the beginning, I've discovered a knack for following a recipe. I like the feeling of bringing in some love to the people I work with. That is until I got a "complaint" from the HR department that I was bringing in too many baked goods and people thought I was being selfish by baking and bringing in what I didn't want to keep at home. Really?

As a recommendation from a few people, part of the moving out of pain and into life again is the emergence back into real life. So I decided to get out of town with some girlfriends. We spent a total of 24 hours in South Lake Tahoe with my friend saying "Hey, so if my tire goes flat, they are run flats, so we can still get home." Why she felt the need to say this, I will never know, but it seems to have jinx the occasion, because on the way home, precisely that happened, excluding the part about the run flat. Instead, 100 miles from home, I tried to fill up the tire with air (since the driver didn't know how) and it blew up in my face. I almost lost an eye. We spent the better part of Memorial Day entertaining a tow truck driver named Eric with stories of our two hours of drunkenness in high altitude SST.

Wednesday day was a bad day at work. Since my work load has been a little light, I decided to get some coffee. As I am leaving, I ran directly into the guy I had briefly dated before I met my ex (whom I left him for). I found out he works a few floors above me. Seriously? Later that day, a few of us decided to head out for happy hour. On my way there I happened into one of those guys that was a fling you wish you could forget. Sweet, 0-2. As I walk into Pyramid, I felt the blood drain from my face as I look at the bar and there he is, bald ass head and all. The ex. I sat down with my friends and took a moment to decide my next course of action: 1) drink copious amounts of alcohol and say something stupid later claiming innocence by intoxication, 2) walk up to him and hit in the face like a man (I prefer closed fisted to increase impact), 3) or wait and see if he noticed I was there, feigning an intensely amazing amount of happiness and joy. I took option D and got the hell out of there. Preserving sanity is always the best answer. As I walked away at a clipped pace, chain-smoking my way to my car, I couldn't help but think, I need a Radioflyer for this baggage.

It helps to laugh at the crappy things that happen. It also tends to put things in perspective. A few scenarios into my crazy jumbled attempt to find what fits all over again, there are a myriad of small and large failures, with a precious few successes in between. Somewhere in there a thought begins to form that maybe what worked before isn't going to work now. What I use to be able to return to isn't seeming to really do the job it did before. Partying like a typical 26 year old feels like putting on a shoe that's too tight. I can make it work for a few hours, but I'm going to pay for it the next day, and usually it comes at the cost of my dignity. Suzy-homemaker is great, until it's a question of the chocolate chip cookie baked to perfection, in front of me, or the gym. I have never been the one who can have flour on their face and manage to look "cute." I just look frantic.

The conundrum comes in realizing maybe my heart has known before my head wanted to accept the truth: once you leave home, you can never go back. It works in the literal as much as the figurative. Everything that once was, I have begun to grow out of, and they aren't working anymore. I've been fighting it for a long time, probably even before the ex and I broke up. Back then it would have been courageous to leave and stay gone, now it looks a little less like courage and a little more like survival. How free will I ever feel, how peaceful will I ever really be, how much potential will I be able to live up to surrounded by people, places in a place that is a constant reminder of such messages. I wonder, for someone such as me, that hates change, that loves to return to what was comfortable before, that errors more on repetition and less on adventure, making the ultimate decision of not being able to fall back into comfortable discomfort may be the only option for true thriving rather than surviving.

Walking away from my ex, knowing I was making a choice to not return to the old in any way, putting it behind me, one step at a time, it was bitter sweet. He would never know I was there, he would never know I saw him and I was glad for it. I didn't want to know anything about him, I didn't want to see him or talk to him, I just wanted to preserve what healing I have had and keep moving one determined foot in front of the other.

And so that is what I did. And now I consider, may that be the case again? May I have to put one determined foot in front of the other and walk away from a past that haunts me? I'm not sure yet, but while I'm considering it, I'm going to piss off a few people again and bake some more.