It is snowing here in Portland Oregon today, and I am grateful that I am in my warm house. As I get older I feel like I can’t handle the cold as much as I did when I was younger. I like looking at it, but go out in it? No thanks! Probably because I am not drinking anymore too. It used to be fun to take a shot of warm brandy, bundle up and walk the neighborhood in the snow. Walking in the snow doesn’t seem as fun without that alcohol coursing through my veins to keep me warm. So, I have replaced these tipsy walks with staying in my warm house and being creative. It is a more solitary experience, but I don’t feel lonely. In fact, just the opposite. Even though I am creating alone, I feel surrounded by love. I feel happy. I feel excited about what I am creating.

Being creative every weekend has trained my emotions and brain to go to that place. So, now when I wake up on Saturday morning my brain automatically starts thinking about what I want to write about. I have been writing my blog for a little over a year now, and it is amazing how in such a short time I have developed this very ingrained habit. I used to spend my Saturdays at the gym punishing myself for drinking and eating too much the night before. I wouldn’t stop working out until every last bit of energy had been squeezed out of me. Sometimes I would be arguing with a family member, friend or my husband so I would be texting angrily in between exercises. I would walk by the full length mirror and my critical eyes would only see my faults. My eyes wouldn’t see that I was in pretty good shape for my age, they wouldn’t see how hard I had worked all week, they wouldn’t see the emotions inside of me, except for anger. I was filled with shame and it clung on to me like a wet blanket. The drinking didn’t help. The drinking made me more anxious and short tempered.

But it wasn’t just the drinking. It was a combination of everything that I had been through, and everything I kept putting myself through. I couldn’t even comprehend being creative back then. It was always some far off goal to convert my detached garage into an art studio. It was going to happen one day, and that would be the day I would start drawing again. I never put a deadline on it, so the idea just floated around in space and seemed unachievable. I felt like I didn’t have the time to be creative, or maybe I felt like I didn’t deserve to feel the love that was inside of me. I didn’t deserve to develop and nurture that love in order to be creative. I saw myself as a worker. I needed to get things done. My self worth came from how other people saw me. If they saw me as productive that made me feel worthwhile. This came from my childhood, as I was trained as a child to see myself in terms of my value to other people. I was trained not to say no or stand up for myself. I thought because I had physically gotten away from my family that they didn’t affect me anymore. But they lived inside of me everyday. I repeated what I had learned from them over and over to the point that I didn’t even know that I could say no to myself. I didn’t know I had the power to change my behavior towards myself. That I could stop beating myself up. I didn’t have to work out at the gym until I felt like I was going to collapse. I didn’t have to drink alcohol to the point that I felt sick to my stomach, my skin dried out and my eyes glazed over. I didn’t know that it was within my control to stop my own self abuse. I didn’t know I had a choice, and it made me angry. I felt powerless. I was angry at myself, and I was angry at other people.

So, I thought I could burn off my anger by constantly moving. I was in a one woman race. But a race that had no clear finish line. This race sometimes consisted of me driving around town aimlessly. What was I trying to accomplish? Exhaustion. I was trying to exhaust myself. All that running around was being done to tire myself out so I could stand to be with myself. If I was tired, I didn’t have to look at myself. Plus if I was exhausted then I would have an excuse not to make changes. A part of me knew I needed to make changes in my life, but my fear of what those changes may look like stopped me. I was scared. My fear kept me going through the motions of a life I had outgrown. And it was easier to go through the motions when I was exhausted, drinking or hungover. It made it bearable to do nothing about my dissatisfaction.

It is snowing harder now than when I first started writing. It is supposed to snow all week, and that is okay. I am in my warm house being creative and there is no place that I would rather be. I don’t need to wander aimlessly anymore looking for my value in other people’s eyes. When I walk by the mirror in my house I smile at myself. I look goofy with my hair in a bun and my baggy sweats on. But I see myself now. I have compassion for who I was, like I would for a friend who didn’t know better at the time. I have come a long way from my frantic days of punishing myself. I see my own value now. I feel my worth, even when I am alone in my house. I never knew this feeling existed, or was possible. I am not angry anymore, even at my family. They never knew me. But now I know me, and that is all that matters.

I am in midlife, or at least I think I am. I am 53 years old, so does that put me in the midlife category or maybe the post midlife category? I hear some women as young as 35 saying that they are in midlife, so the term confuses me. In our society’s eyes I am the older woman, the empty nester, the woman in menopause. Notice how all these words have a feeling of loss to them. Being ‘older’, the ’empty’ nester and meno’pause’. The definition of pause in this case means to cease. These words all describe something that is dying, empty and stopping. But that is far from how I feel right now.

I still feel like I am young. Or maybe young is the wrong term, because there are people much younger than me that don’t feel good at all. A better way to say this would be I feel lighter, happier, stronger and more brave than I did when I was younger. I used to use most of my energy to hide my abusive past and search for validation in everyone else’s eyes but mine. That was an exhausting time for me, and looking back I don’t know how I kept it going for so long. So, I definitely feel better now that I am using that same energy to create art and write this blog. It is more rewarding, and I feel more engaged in life than I used to. Yes, I am chronologically older, and I accept that, but I have more life inside of me now.

The ’empty’ nester is an interesting term. I have always wondered who coined that phrase. I don’t think you can compare humans to birds. If you do, than this phrase doesn’t make sense anyway. Has anyone ever had a bird make a nest in their yard to have her babies? If you have, then I am sure that you noticed all the preparation that went into creating the nest. The mother bird gathers string, leaves and small branches to build her nest for her expectant babies. Once the nest is created the mother bird spends most of her time there until she lays her eggs and has her babies. A baby bird is so tiny and helpless and the mother is constantly there tending and feeding her young. The babies slowly learn, by watching their mom, that they can fly too. Once the baby birds fly away from the nest, the nest is abandoned. The mother bird doesn’t sit alone in the nest and cry, she flies away on to new adventures. I am that mother bird now.

So, as my daughter is learning how to fly by herself, I also am dusting off my wings. I am surveying the landscape, gathering information and seeing where I want to go. I am not staying in an empty nest. I am not waiting for my daughter to come back and be a baby again. That time is over. If the mother bird sat in an empty nest waiting for her chicks to come back, she would most likely not survive. She needs so spread her wings and fly again. She needs to move on.

I am not saying that it is easy to move on, but I am saying that it is necessary. If I was meant to have babies my whole life then I would have been given that capability. But my body wasn’t built that way. Being 53 now, I cannot get pregnant. My body was created to have babies up to a certain age, and then after that age I was meant to do something else with my life. This is nothing new, it is the way it has always been.

Menopause! I for one am glad that I don’t get my period anymore. I will take feeling a little warm over my period anytime. But just like no woman experiences her body in the exact same way, no woman goes through menopause the exact same way. It is an individual experience. No one knows how my body feels when I wake up in the morning, or when I work out, or when I eat. I am the only one that experiences what goes on inside of my body. My period has stopped, I can no longer have biological children, and I no longer have to plan around ‘that time of the month.’ Is this a bad thing? I am glad that my period has stopped, I don’t desire to have any more children, and I can wear white pants whenever I feel like it. These are good, positive changes.

Mother nature knows what she is doing, and these changes are all part of her plan to have me go in another direction. The earth needs my writing and art to help heal it. I don’t have to be a world renowned artist or author, but my positive energy, however small, is going out into the world. I feel it reaching people and making a difference.

Yes, I am a midlife, empty nester, menopausal woman. But these are just words and they don’t describe me as a person. They don’t describe what I have overcome, and they don’t describe my current purpose. Just like other labels in our society, these labels are unflattering. They describe someone who is old and empty. They describe someone who is slowing down and stopping. That is not me.

I have dusted off my wings and started flying again. I can fly because I am lighter without the weight of trying to please other people and prove myself. I have wasted so much time trying to prove myself to people that saw me as something that I wasn’t. I have wasted so much time trying to get people to see me as the person that I am, and not the label that they gave me.

I don’t have time to prove myself to anyone anymore, I am too busy flying.

“What do you know about empowering women? You can’t pass yourself off as an expert if you are not! I don’t think your idea is going to work.” These are the words I heard a little over a year ago from a coach at a very reputable coaching firm when I presented my idea of empowering women through writing a blog. He didn’t get it. He thought I should have prior experience, a degree or some stamp of approval before I could create a blog and website about woman empowerment. These words 10 or even 5 years before would have crushed me and stopped in my tracks. Because there would have been a part of me that believed him. I would have believed that my voice didn’t matter. What did I have to say that hadn’t already been said, and said by people that were more qualified to share their opinions that I was. He seemed angry and frustrated with me, almost like I was wasting his time. I was hurt, and felt stupid. He kept talking for the next 20 minutes of the trial coaching session, but I had tuned out. I mentally fogged over and went quiet as my feelings of inadequacy rose up within me. He had triggered my defenses of not listening and spacing out when hurtful words were being said to me. My idea at the time, was just that, an idea. It was a feeling that I couldn’t quite fully express yet. I thought maybe this coach could put into words what I was feeling so that I could take action. But he couldn’t. He didn’t understand it. So, instead of him just saying that to me, he got angry.

Why did it seem that other people were constantly trying to keep me quiet? And why were they so angry? Was I hitting a nerve in them? This wasn’t about them, it was about me. This was about me doing something that I was passionate about. I have always believed that women have so much untapped potential. It was an abstract idea, but I just felt it, and felt that it was important. This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to shut me down. I felt like in subtle and not so subtle ways this had happened to me my whole life.

At the end of the call he asked if I wanted to sign up for the coaching program. I was a little shocked that after the way he had treated me that he would even ask. I told him that I would have to think about it. In a mocking tone, he said “If you can’t decide right now, than you are not a right fit for us.” Another jab, that didn’t go unnoticed by my heart. ‘Ok’, I said to him, ‘but just so you know nothing is going to stop me from moving forward on my idea. I am doing this!’ He hung up. This was a coaching program that I had been listening to on YouTube, and Podcasts almost a year before this call. I believed in their process, so his unkind words and impatience with me hit me even harder. To me, it was like a trusted friend suddenly turning on me.

Through my hurt and doubt, I was determined to move forward and create my blog and website. His words slowed me a little, but didn’t stop me. I had been stopped and silenced so many times earlier in my life, but I had made the commitment to myself to do this no matter what. I came up with a mantra, “I will write even if everyone is mad at me and no one reads my writing, I will write!” I would say this to myself when I was feeling insecure or I felt like people were mad at me and didn’t understand me. Creating my blog and website was a solitary process. There wasn’t a boss over my shoulder asking about my progress, there wasn’t people relying on me to get this all set up so that they could do their part, there wasn’t an audience waiting for my writing. There was nothing. Just long hours of me clicking away at my computer alone trying to figure things out. No one was invested in what I was doing, except for me.

When I published my first blog post, it was 300 rambling words and no one read it except for my husband. But, I felt a sense of accomplishment anyway. I did it! I wrote a blog post! No one stopped me, no one silenced me, no one judged me. There was something dangerous yet exciting about making it public for everyone to read. For some reason, this allowed me to let go of long held negative beliefs about myself. I didn’t have to hold secrets or insecurities inside anymore to eat away at my confidence. That alone was rewarding enough to me, but when women started signing up for my mailing list, commenting on my blog, and telling me that they felt the same way my heart almost burst opened.

My blog started out as an idea to empower other women, but I realize now that I needed it to empower myself. There was a deep desire in me to tell my truth that I could no longer ignore. I have learned a lot in writing this blog, but the most important thing I have learned is that life is not static. I will not reach a point in my life of nirvana and say, ‘Ok that is it, I am completely happy and I don’t need to ever grow or challenge myself again!’ I feel like I have always been trying to reach that point, and once I got there I could just relax and be comfortable. But now I know that will never happen. A small part of me will change every single day. It will change whether I like it or not. It will change because I am a living breathing being. Change is going to happen, so why shouldn’t I have a say in the direction I am going?

Looking back on my conversation with that coach, I realize that there is nothing he could have said to help me that day. I was looking to him to give me answers about the direction of my life. I was asking him what I should do with myself to get where I wanted to go. I gave him my power and asked him to tell me my future. But, I needed to look inside and find these answers for myself. I was being lazy, I wanted someone to make it easy for me and walk me down a clear path with minimal mistakes and hurt. That is impossible. I know that now. Coaches, family and friends can give me their opinion, can tell me their experiences and try and guide me, but I have come to realize that no one can tell me what to do with my life but me. I have to do the work. I have to listen to myself, decide what is important and keep my commitments to myself. This isn’t a one time event, it is a daily practice. There is no easy way out, and no one will do this work for me.

My idea is now a reality, I write a weekly blog about taking back my power. People actually do read it, and I feel like they feel empowered too. But my commitment to myself and my mantra has not changed, and that is “I will write, even if everyone is mad at me and no one reads my writing. I will write!”

So, what is the challenge part? That hopefully we look and feel better than we did 10 years ago, or at least that we haven’t completely gone off the rails. I got curious about it when I had a hard time remembering what I was doing in 2009. I had to figure it out from how old my daughter was, and go from there. She was just entering middle school, and once I figured that out, the rest of my life started to fill in. My memories were so foggy though, it made me want to explore it further. I was working in finance, taking my daughter to theatre rehearsals, and going to her plays. We adopted a Saint Bernard that year and our weekends were spent working out and drinking with friends. But how did I feel? I was still hiding back then. I would make it through my days by being what I thought everyone wanted me to be. And I would spend my nights exhausted and numb.

But, when I would go to my daughter’s plays and watch her put her heart on the line and perform despite her fears, I would feel like crying. At the time I thought my tears were for her, but now I see they were for me too. I didn’t have time to be artistic and express myself like my daughter was doing. There were bills to pay, a corporate ladder to climb, people to please. The time for me to express myself artistically has passed, and it was too late to even try. I had to be a responsible adult. But, there was a desire deep inside me to jump up on that stage and be a part of it. There was a part of me that wanted to overcome my fears and express myself too. When I would see her doing it, it stirred up that part of me that I had buried and forgotten. It brought up a sadness and a regret that I carried with me without even realizing it.

In 2009, most of my social life revolved around alcohol. Happy hours, martini bars, making new drinks at home, trying new drinks with friends. I was working hard, and this was my reward. When I would have feelings of dissatisfaction and loneliness I would think that there was something wrong with me. I would get scared that I would fall into a depression if I looked too closely. I considered myself a person that was prone to depression because I grew up in an abusive household. I thought that being sad was at my core and there was nothing I could do it change it. But because I didn’t look closer at my feelings, I had no idea what I really wanted, or what fulfilled me. So, I relied on the people around me to make me feel fulfilled. If my family and friends were happy, then I was happy. I thought that I was a giving person, who worked hard to make people happy. But I wasn’t. In being so reliant on them for my own emotional state, I didn’t allow them to have their own feelings. Because if they were sad, I took it personally. If they were sad, then I had failed.

I had a hard time remembering my life 10 years ago, because I wasn’t really present. I wasn’t being authentic because I was using all my energy to hide my feelings of inadequacy. I had already given up on myself. I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to limp through the rest of my life with my burden of regrets. It wasn’t anything I had consciously decided, it was who I had become, it was at my very core. I would live like this for 5 more years before my exhaustion and emotional state would become intolerable. The journey that led me to stop drinking and rediscovering my artistic side was not of my choosing. I didn’t sit down one day and say, hey I miss that stuff I am going to start writing and drawing again. It was a process that started with nothingness.

When I stopped trying to please people, stopped drinking, and stopped trying to control others emotions I felt a void that was the most painful feeling I have ever felt. It was a void and stillness that rang in my ears every minute of every single day. It was a void that made me feel like an empty shell of a person going through the motions. I understand why people don’t want to look inside. It hurts! But after a while my feelings quietly started appearing, my real feelings. They were like whispers that I had to stay calm in order to hear. I slowly started coming back to life, but in a whole new way. Life started to make more sense, and I started noticing things that had always been there but that had been invisible to me. I learned to allow anger, sadness, regret, loneliness to become a part of my life, instead of running from them. I realized that the sadness I had been feeling wasn’t all from my past. I was sad because I had written myself off, and thought that it was too late to follow my dreams. I was sad because I didn’t believe in myself enough to even try.

My challenge now is to keep living authentically. To live a life that speaks to my heart, and to have the courage to express it to others. My challenge is to keep believing in myself, even when my path doesn’t make sense or resonate with others. I need to remember that they are not living my life. They are not the ones that made the choice to look into the void in order to come to the other side. And they didn’t cry at their daughter’s play because there was a little girl inside of them that wanted to be heard too. No one but me knows the feeling I have when I connect with others through my writing and my drawing. And to think it almost never happened, to think I could have kept my artistic side buried for the rest of my life. That is the only thing that makes me sad now.

My challenge is to keep remembering where I came from, and to keep remembering where I want to be 10 years from now.

So, I slept for 12 hours last night, and I just starting writing at 11:00 AM. I usually am almost done writing by now, but today I am slow moving. The sun is out and my cat is laying on the window sill soaking it in. I feel like my cat today. I just want to lay and stare out the window and think of nothing. I just want to watch the pine trees slowly blow in the wind, and watch the people walk their dogs by my house. It is that type of day. My mind has been in overdrive for the past couple of weeks, creating my book and drawing my illustrations, as well as working full time. This is the year that I have decided that everything will come together. So, a part of me feels like it has already happened, and I am frantically trying to catch up. But I am feeling depleted today. I was so tired last night that after my husband and I went out I almost ran upstairs to get into bed. I felt like a 5 year old that if I stayed up much longer I might throw a tantrum and start bawling.

I am not going to take my tiredness and slowness this morning as a sign that I want to quit everything as I would have in the past. After all, I heard somewhere that January 12th is known as quitters day, where people give up there New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t think people are quitters. I know for me, it is hard to keep my excitement up about achieving a goal when I work all week and I am tired, and I have to do the mundane things that keep life moving along. I believe the goals I set, and other people set, show good intention. It shows self awareness and a hope that there is a better version of ourselves yet to be discovered.

Progress comes in small steps. Changes sometimes take years. The journey that led me to where I am now started in October 2014. I had a breaking point. I am ambitious, and I like to feel like I am moving forward in life. I had a good job in financial services and I was pouring most of my energy into my career. I was promoted into management and I wanted to prove myself as a manager and keep moving up the ladder. The praise I received from my job became very important to me. It started to become a part of who I was as a person. So, I would feel good when things went well at work, and I would feel bad if things didn’t go well. I would spend my weekends going over scenarios in my head of how I could have done things better. My ego and sense of self was so wrapped up in my job, that when I was ‘counseled’ into stepping back into a staff position my self-esteem plummeted. They didn’t want me, they didn’t like me. I had tried my hardest and it wasn’t good enough. From that point forward there was a nagging dissatisfaction with my life. I needed that praise from outside myself to make me feel ok, and when it stopped I started falling apart.

At first I thought I needed to move. I needed to move away from the short days and rain in Portland to sunny Los Angeles where it seemed like the days were full of potential. I convinced myself that if I could just move there that everything would be ok. Somehow my life would fall into place and I would be happy. It was all I could think about to the point that I couldn’t focus on anything else. I felt so distracted and outside myself I knew I needed some help to sort things out. So, I enlisted the help of a life coach. I know I was so scattered on those first few phone appointments with her. I remember pouring out in 30 minutes all my disappointments in life. Talking about moving to Los Angeles one minute, and the next minute crying about my failures as a mom, sister, and wife. I was all over the map. I was embarrassed. I was thinking that the coach was probably rolling her eyes on the other end of the phone thinking I was crazy. My thoughts were so jumbled and confusing, I couldn’t make sense of them, let alone explain them to anyone else.

I was in so much pain, I wanted to give up and wallow in my self pity and spend my days dreaming of moving away from it all. But I didn’t do that. I hung in there. I talked to my coach every 2 weeks. She emailed me worksheets to complete, and inspirational quotes to keep me motivated. If I was making bad choices and I was being hard on myself, she would pick out the one positive thing that I did that week and highlight it for me. It would be something that I wouldn’t have even noticed if it wasn’t for her. I was making progress but it was slow and frustrating. I have always been a person who knows what they want and takes action, so to be swimming in confusion, indecisiveness, and stagnation was about the worst place for me to be. It gave me extreme anxiety. She would gently encourage me as I tried new things, and put myself out there. Somehow, somewhere, I had lost my compass for my own life. I had become so dependent on my employer, my husband, my daughter, my sisters to approve and validate me. I had no idea what I wanted for myself, or even who I was.

It was an extremely slow and excruciating process, but I finally started to see myself again. I started to recognize small parts of myself and trust the direction I was going. I had craved space, and I had thought the only way I could get it was by moving away to different city. But I was starting to realize that I just needed to claim my own space in my life right where I was. I needed to do the work to get to know myself well enough to set boundaries and honor my feelings. I needed to let myself explore and make mistakes, and be kind to myself.

Today, I feel that I have come to the other side of most of my confusion and frustration. My journey led me to writing and drawing again, which were my hobbies as a teenager. It made me remember how much I loved doing these things, and how connected to life I felt when I did them. Now, writing and drawing helps ground me, and gives me a sense of self that I used to rely on other people to give to me.

My journey took 4 years and continues today. It was not a quick or easy fix. I gave up at times out of sheer frustration over the years, but I never gave up for good. I am not a quitter! I know this about myself now, and I have more confidence because of it. And probably the most important thing I have learned is that I don’t have to feel motivated and excited every single day to achieve my goals, but as long as my good days outnumber my bad days I will move forward.

Why am I attracted to people who reject me?

Why am I attracted to people who reject me? Why do I feel the need to prove myself, and make them see me in a different light?Why does it become so important to me to  convince them that I am a good person with good intentions?  What about my feelings towards the person rejecting me? Do I even like them?  Is there a connection between us that is worth my energy?  I don’t ask those questions.   I am only  focussed on me and my feelings of being rejected.  I need this person to accept me so that I feel better!  I give them the power over my emotions and ultimately over me.  Why do I do this?  I feel like I am a strong woman in most aspects of my life, so why do I  anxiously run around seeking approval when I feel rejected?

But I was alone!

I guess I have to look back to my childhood to find the root of this feeling.  I grew up in an abusive household, where my main focus was walking the fine line of living my life and keeping my parents happy enough so that I wouldn’t be the recipient of their anger.  This meant keeping my questions to myself, and mostly staying silent about what was going on around me.  I mastered this skill long enough to get my college education and start my own life.  When I moved out on my own, I distanced myself from my parents. I wanted to be free from their judgement.  I wanted to be able to have my own opinions without being criticized. I wanted to be able to ask questions without being silenced.  And I did feel an amazing sense of freedom out on my own, and it felt good.  But I was alone. And as much as I resented my parents, I still wanted them to notice me.    I wanted them to be proud of me.   I wanted them to care.  Why was this so important to me?  I knew who they were because  I had spent the first 20 years of my life with them.  My parents were self involved people that used their children to meet their own needs.  Why did I expect them to all of a sudden change and be happy  for me and interested in my life?  They were not happy people.  And I started to see  that they were creating their own unhappiness.

Because I needed my parents as a child

But this was the way it had always been with them, so why did I expect them to change?  Maybe because now that I was out in the world, I was exposed to different ways to handle life.  Ways that seemed kinder, made more sense to me, and in my opinion, seemed like a better way to live.   I thought that maybe my parents didn’t know that there was another way, and if they just learned about it then they would be happier. I loved them.  But my love for them made it hurt all the more.  Somehow I believed that if they could just see the good in me and the world around them that it would erase all my past childhood hurt.  Somehow I believed that if they could just see me for who I really was that the past would become just a huge misunderstanding.  And in that moment, we  would all hug and accept each other,  and be a family. So, for this reason, I kept the hope alive in me that somehow they were on my side, that a small part of both of them believed in me.  Maybe I held onto this hope to make myself feel better.  Maybe I held onto this hope so that I wasn’t so lonely.  Maybe I had learned as a child that hope was an invaluable emotion to have in order to survive. Because the feeling of rejection as a child was like death, and my imagination needed to fill in the blanks to make it bearable.  Because I needed my parents as a child.    I needed  food and shelter, and  their affection and attention. When  they rejected me I wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle the feelings that came up for me, so I would instead use all of my energy to try and convince them to accept me.  To try and convince them that I was a good person with good intentions.  I realize now that I was never going to convince them of anything, and that this was just my defense mechanism so that I didn’t have to see the truth.

The Truth!

And the truth was that my parents didn’t have an interest in me beyond what I could do for them. The truth was that my parents would never be proud of me because they didn’t even see the real me. The truth was that my parents didn’t care enough about me to get to know me as a child or an adult.  The truth was that when I found my own voice and starting living my own life,  my parents didn’t notice me, they ignored me.   I couldn’t accept these truths, they were too painful.  But in not accepting the truth and holding onto hope into adulthood,  I gave  them exactly what they wanted.  I gave them power over me.  In seeing the truth, I can heal the hurt of my past rather than using all my energy to try and make it different. I don’t have to try and convince anyone to accept me anymore.

I can take my power back

If I am feeling rejected now, I can just feel it.  It is after all, just a feeling.  It is not the end of the world, and it no longer threatens my survival.  As a child my defense mechanisms didn’t allow me to take a moment to see the truth as it would have emotionally devastated me, and I am truly grateful for my resourcefulness and survival skills.  But now I can take that moment. I can breathe before I react and look at the reality of a situation. And with that breath and in that moment,  I can take my power back.

The night I met my husband, I had been moving all day and he offered to come over to help me set up my furniture in my new place.  He helped me put the bed together and we got in it, and from that day forward we never left each other’s side. Even though I had just met him he seemed so familiar to me. Everything I said he nodded in knowing agreement. He got me, plain and simple.  We both came from large families where chaos and confusion was a daily event, and we both craved calm and understanding, and we found it in each other.  I couldn’t get married fast enough.  I didn’t care about a big wedding,  I just wanted to start a new life with him. I wanted to start over.  I had been a part of the San Francisco party scene and had not been the best version of myself.  I wanted to leave that person behind and start new.  Shortly after we got married we moved to a new city where we didn’t know a soul.  A new city, a new life, a new me.  We were going to be different.  We weren’t going to let life get the better of us, and take it out on each other.  We were going to love each other, and always be there for each other.  And we did do just that in the beginning.   We were a great team.  We seemed to know what the other person was thinking before they said it.  When our daughter was born we realized that our parenting styles were very similar  and we rarely argued about how to bring her up.  We were the 3 amigos, nothing could break us apart.  Nothing!  My focus was always my family first, and then everything else after that. My husband and I would go on date nights, and sit close together in a booth and feel warm and connected.  We would work out together, shower together, eat together.  We were together.  I didn’t analyze this too much, or think what the next day or the future held.  We were in our own little bubble of warmth and security that nothing could pop.   I had everything I wanted, everything I had been working for.  But when my daughter got into high school a persistent, annoying thought kept entering my brain.  ‘What about me?’ I would do my best to ignore it, and move on.  But it just got stronger, ‘what about me?’   Slowly, dissatisfaction started to creep into my mind. All the boxes that I had fought so hard to check, were checked, but instead of being happy I wanted to run out the door and be by myself.  It was like another person took over my body and I could no longer control my thoughts or emotions.  I had the perfect marriage, the perfect family, what was wrong with me?  I looked to my husband for reassurance that we were doing the right thing, and that everything was ok.  Instead of reassurance he had a distant look in his eyes and he asked,  ‘what about me?’.  Shit! We were both lost.  Normally one of us would pull the other back towards our family and each other.  We looked to our teenage daughter for reassurance, and without saying a word her actions stated , ‘it’s all about me’.  We became 3 roommates sharing a house instead of being a family. I would go in and out of periods of wanting to make it all work.  For a month or so I would cook dinners and clean the house, and be the attentive listener and cheerleader for the family, but the next month I would barely be home.  I would spend hours at the gym, go out with girlfriends, take a class, or just drive around by myself.  My car became my safe haven for planning and having ‘me’ time. I would come home and feel guilty, like I was having an affair, because I knew emotionally I was drifting.  And the fact was,  it was about another person, but that other person was me.  Disagreements and heated arguments ensued and our relationship became a power struggle.  I kept saying that  I just needed some time and space to sort things out and then I would be fine.  But there was never enough time and space.  I felt like I was suffocating.  My daughter went off to college, and I thought things would settle down, but it only got worse as  we both wanted to dictate what our new life was going to look like.   We both were putting ourselves first, and the relationship and family second.  My perfect marriage, my perfect family was disintegrating before my eyes.  It completely broke my heart.  It made me sad as I thought about how I started out so full of hope to beat the odds, only to arrive at the exact place I thought I would never be.   How can I plan, and hope and use all my energy to avoid something, and then arrive there anyway?  I was so angry and felt like all my energy over the years had been wasted.  ‘What about me?’ this thought was now a constant in my brain, crowding out any other thoughts.  I would cry and feel sorry for myself.   I was sad, lonely, and disappointed.  Had I wasted my life?  Finally I had to start telling my friends that I no longer had the perfect marriage.  And I was surprised to find my story was not unusual.  In fact there wasn’t one person I talked to that didn’t feel some form of what I was feeling.  I always thought my bond with my husband was special and beyond what other people had, so I was completely  humbled when we became distant.  But in talking to other women I  realized that they felt exactly like me.  Other women believed that they had the perfect marriage, that they had found the man of their dreams, that nothing was going to break them apart and their family would be together forever.  I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.  We all started out with an open heart and a desire to have an amazing connection with our husbands, and change part of the world through our children.   And we did it.  Our energy and intention is out in the world, our love and our desire to create a beautiful place did make a difference.  When I see mothers teaching their small children with patience and love,  or a couple beaming with the flush of romance,  I feel their energy even if I am just walking by for a moment.  What I did matters!  And it will always matter.  I added to the good energy of this world, and that can never be taken away.  But, what I didn’t realize is that what I am going to do next also matters.  All my energy that created my beautiful family is still within me and will now be expressed in a different form.  The phrase ‘what about me?’ was coming into my head for a good reason, it was letting me know that it was time to shift my focus.  It was preparing me to use my energy in a different way, even if I didn’t agree at the time.  Letting that change happen without trying to control the outcome has been extremely difficult.  I had no idea where I was going, and that was a scary feeling.  My husband was also feeling the pull of redirecting his energy.  And neither of us knew if we were going to end up at the same place. Would we drift apart or drift together?  We were two people that met and immediately bonded, we created a beautiful life and family and so many happy memories together.  Did we want to part ways and say that chapter is now over?  Neither of us knew.  But in our drifting somehow we would always come back to each other.  No matter where our energy took us it would eventually lead back to us holding hands even if we weren’t talking. It would lead us to wondering where the other person was, even if we were mad at them.  It would lead us to having long talks  about our past, about our hurts, and about our hopes for the future.  We have become 2 wanderers that  eventually always wander  back to each other.  And when we do,  we find opened arms, understanding and the same connection we felt the day we met.   And I think that is perfect.