soooo hard......

It's wild to consider, but a year ago, I was on disability leave from work. I was clinging to life by my teeth. I only came off of medical leave 8 months ago.

I never expected things to be easy.

I knew it was going to be hard.

Why does it always have to be soooo hard?

That's the part I fail to understand.

When I grow up I want to be one of those people who live charmed lives. Who actually experience things falling into place.

Just when it seems like things are under control, there's just one more complication. I can never quite get settled because the rug gets pulled out from underneath me. And I don't think I'm exaggerating. It's been like this for three years now. Just straight out ~ not that my life before that was a cake walk ~ I just had little reprieves of calm. Chances to regroup.

And here I am trying to figure out what I did wrong! What did I do to deserve this? As if I'm the victim of some cosmic retribution and if I can only make amends then it will all stop.

What a ridiculous idea, right?

This whole move. This whole relocation and radical alteration of my life. It feels oddly like Under the Tuscan Sun (the movie, not the book) if only because it felt like this great chance to make an enormous change in my life that would have to better because as Diane Lane's character says "I can't go back." I didn't factor in "a rental car to drive off a cliff when I realize what a huge mistake this is" when I looked at financing my new home ~ I brought my own car with me.

Then maybe that's what all this rug pulling is about.

The universe recognizes that I'm not one to resist inertia unless the floor falls out from underneath me.

Is this all in the name of making me into the person I'm supposed to be? Does that make me fate's bitch? And make fate an even bigger bitch? There's one to ponder.

But still, here I am. A completely different person than I was three years ago. Physically, emotionally, mentally, geographically. I'm not the same person.

Am I a better person? In some ways, yes. In some ways I wonder if my self as it was, has been beaten out of me or merely abandoned for the path of least resistance.

In my late twenties I decided to give up certain fears. I was always afraid of haunted houses, but it seemed like a ridiculous thing to be afraid of after everything I had been through in my life. How could someone jumping out of a coffin with a chainsaw possibly scaring when I had really stared down death? Or the supposed lunatic in the hockey mask, when I had been locked in a psych ward with the real thing?

I went to five haunted houses that year. They didn't even startle me. I stopped being afraid of getting lost and I stopped being afraid of being alone. I realized that my life and my experiences had shown me what I was capable of enduring.

So now I wonder, is this another metamorphosis? Or did I just think that I had emerged last year? (Was the tattoo premature? ~ not to worry, there won't be a second one.)

I think that's how I'm going to view all this. It's just another battle out of the cocoon. It's not a setback, merely part of the process of emerging as my true self.