it's the last day of 2011

and I'm ready for this year to be over. It wasn't a bad year. In so very many ways it was a wonderful year. But, it was another year filled with changes, that followed several really hard years filled with many changes, and it's with a lot of relief that I can put the giant check mark next to 2011 and mark it as "Done."

Not that 2012 isn't going to be filled with changes as well. It will. It's all part of the forward motion of life. But I think 2012 will be less about "firsts" and "baby steps" and more about making strides on this journey of mine.

I was going to do a year in review type of post, and list a bunch of the stuff that I've dealt with in 2011. But now that I'm writing, I don't really see the point. The "firsts" are in the blog, as are many of the baby steps. The healing...yeah, it's there too. That might not have been on the most straightforward path, as I would have liked, but when I look back to the beginning of 2011 and see where I am now at the end of the year, I've walked farther down the healing path than I realized.

It's a good feeling, to be able to look back over the past year and see how much farther I've come, what I've accomplished.

Good bye 2011 - thanks, for everything you brought me, the lessons you taught me, and for all the wonderful, loving, caring people who were in my life during the year!

2012

It's right around the corner. Time to start reflecting on the past year, and continue to plan where I want to be and what I want to accomplish in the new year.

It's going to take longer than I have at the moment to sum up last year. There was several setbacks, but there was also a lot of forward motion. A lot of big changes happened in 2011, for me. I expect 2012 will hold still more changes.

It wasn't until the end of 2009, and the beginning of 2010 that I began to truly appreciate the fresh slate of a new year. 2009 was a year that just needed to be done with, and I was fortunate enough to have some real new beginnings as 2010 started. That allowed me to see the new year as a fresh, clean slate with me being the one with the colorful chalk, drawing and planning a wonderful new future, filled with adventures.

And now I'm seeing 2012 that way, a blank page that I can fill with the colors of adventures, love, and joy.

low-key Christmas

It felt kind of odd not making much of an effort about Christmas this year, but now that it's come and gone, I'm glad. It wasn't the most festive of holiday celebrations, but it wasn't stressful, either.

It was definitely a contrast to Christmases past. Ya know, the ones where I made myself crazy trying to make sure everyone else would have a good holiday, and in the process taught them that I wasn't as important as everyone else.

Funny how something like a low-key Christmas can show me that I still have more to learn about myself, and more work to do along this journey I've been taking.

struggling, more than I expected

I'm hoping it's simply a case of holiday blahs and year-end tiredness combined. Or maybe that it's because I've just forgotten to count my blessings lately. But more than likely, it's just more residual fall-out from the shitstorm of 2008-09.

At least I know I'll get through it, whatever these feelings are right now. I've made it through so much worse, and this is small, compared to that.

But I'm ready for things to be...different.

holiday blahs?

There's no doubt about it. I've got the blahs.

I don't want to do anything holiday related. I've avoided going out and doing things with friends. Getting up, especially on Mondays, to go to work takes effort. 

What I don't know is whether it's because of the season, or if it's because I'm tired. It feels more like it's due to the accumulation of the past several years than specifically the holidays. Oh, being in the holiday season isn't helping, but I think I'd feel this way anyway.

humbug! 

baby steps, baby steps

woot! younger son asked me to take him to an activity he wanted to do tonight. if he has a good time, it will become a regular event. it'll require some juggling of my time, after work in the middle of the week, but it'll be worth it to see him getting out of the house and being social again.

there has been so much collateral damage...

I hope this means some real healing has begun.

blogging for work?

well, maybe. I'm supposed to be helping the marketing director with some stuff, mostly writing some white pages. I thought. But I'm going through the tutorials and information, and it looks like what I'm writing can be used as blog posts on the company website. Personally, I think that will be more useful than where the articles are currently being uploaded to, so I think I'm going to grab the initiative here and run with it.

What's the worse that can happen? :p 

kids are resilient, huh?

This has got to be one of the biggest lines of shit that ever get uttered. Seriously.

Resilience: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change (thank you Merriam-Webster.com)

Recover from or adjust easily....  seems to me that people who say kids are resilient forget the "easily" part of the definition.

What kids are is adaptable. (adapt: to make fit, often by modification). Adults too, for that matter. but I want to talk about kids tonight. Specifically, kids who through no fault of their own, have to suffer through their parents' divorces. These kids are adaptable. They make modifications, to make life somehow fit once again.

They do not recover from nor adjust easily to these changes.

There is nothing easy about divorce, especially for the kids. No matter how old they are. Nothing is easy.

And it sucks.

Tonight I logged into faceback, and there in bright blue letters against the white background, the son of one of my friends is now going by a new last name. My friend's maiden name. The name she took back after her divorce.

I don't know the reasons, and I don't know if this is a permanent change or just the anger of a young man coming out in a public "fuck you" to his dad/dad's family. But I do know that if someone has recovered from or adjusted easily to the divorce of his parents, if he is resilient, he doesn't willingly relinquish his father's name.

People who think kids are resilient are deluding themselves. Kids are adaptable. They will make changes. But it doesn't come easily. It comes at great cost.

There is nothing that is easy about a kid surviving their parents' divorce.

a little bit more wine...

and I'm going to turn into an adolescent girlfriend posting youtube links to all sorts of sappy love songs on my boyfriend's fb.

sigh

it's hard, missing someone so much it physically hurts sometimes.

but what a wondrous gift it is to have this man in my life. I am such a lucky woman. :)

TGIF

This has been one of those weeks that would have been so much better if it never started. I'm so glad it's over. Well, almost over. I still need to get through the afternoon at work, but thankfully I've been left alone in the office and it's really quiet. I need some quiet time.

This week has been one of those weeks that make me realize, yet again, that I need to make some changes.

I don't like to make changes. Change scares me. But remaining stagnant is even scarier.

self-sabotage

That's what I've been doing lately. Self-sabotage. Back-tracking, waiting for the other shoe to drop, worrying more about what could happen or seems to be happening, instead of focusing on the here-and-now.

I don't know if it's the time of year, time of month, phase of life, lifelong habits, mind-set, past trauma, or what. But I've been holding myself back, again. Caught in a pattern of not pushing myself to move forward, and by doing that, getting myself caught in the past.

I will give myself credit, I did realize it. This time. I'm not sure how long it took to figure it out, though. It's not like I was back to wallowing. Outwardly, I may even have given the appearance of moving forward. And to give myself credit, I have dealt with things in the past several months that were, in many ways, steps forward. I took care of some important issues, I bought a car, I've replaced several old appliances. I am making progress. I do know this.

But up in my head, there's that whole thinking too much thing going on. And it's very easy for me to get circular in my thinking, when I argue with myself. It's also much easier to believe what I want to believe, just because I want to believe it, without a lot of evidence to back it up.

(That doesn't mean I'm necessarily wrong. But it can mean I'm not always right. :p)

Anyway, I'm letting stuff take up too much space in my head, that shouldn't be there. That's how I self-sabotage these days. Allowing myself to spend way too much time thinking about things I have no control over and cannot change. It's not good. It takes from the time I should be spending doing other things, thinking about my goals and plan, working on myself, gearing up my job search, focusing on what will be because I will be doing it, not on what may happen because someone else might be doing something.

It's a new month, and almost a new year. No more waiting for a shoe (bitch boots or not) to drop. I'm finding other things to think about.