Week Twenty-Five: Making Peace
I would start this weeks blog by apologizing for it being so late but frankly I neither have the energy nor the desire to do so. This is my blog, damn it, and I will write during the week when it suits me! So there. Suck it, self-imposed punctuality!
And on we go!
This last weekend, I had an inordinate amount of things to do. Between work and shindigs with friends and preparing for a family reunion in Nebraska, it seemed that what little free time I had was quickly and unceremoniously taken from me. While it certainly seems to the be the case lately that my life is just full of things and of obligations, I was just swamped with an endless list of tasks to accomplish. Here's the funny thing about that: by the end of it all, I felt not the slightest bit put out by this mountain of responsibilities. Though I normally have a penchant towards irritation (after all, I am a Slytherin and prone to bouts of pessimism and aggravation), when Saturday evening finally rolled around, after sitting around the fire with my cousins and nephews and family, a deep calmness swept over me. It's no small thing to be abundantly blessed with love. I am so full of love for my life and for my friends and for my family (at least the ones who deserve my time) that I could just burst.
How did I turn so sappy lately? Who am I? What in the actual shit is happening to me?! So much of my younger personality was centered on the idea that I was grumpy and pessimistic and only allowed my closest of close friends to see the shiny, bubbly, dorky me. To be quite honest, I think this version of myself is probably a bit better.
Late Saturday evening, long after some of my family members had gone to bed, I had the pleasure of just sitting by myself, Isabelle curled up by my side, listening to the fire crackle in front of me. Peace. There seem to be so few occasions where life is just silent, where the only sounds life gives are the ones that occur naturally. I read somewhere, and I couldn't tell you where, that some folks believe we're overrun with unnatural sound; that as an overdeveloped, over-full, over-saturated culture we have lost the connection with ourselves through silence.
I have to believe there's some merit to that: in that space, of quiet I came to a few conclusions.
Making peace with our unmet expectations seems to be an important part of growing older. We don't always get what we want or go where we want or become who we want. I certainly haven't. If you'd asked my eighteen year old self, fresh out of high school with both the air of superiority (because let's be honest: I was kind of a pain in the ass then) and a steadfast belief in my own ability to accomplish anything, what my life would be like at almost thirty, I don't think it would have been this. And that truth kind of stings a little bit. And while I recognize that this may sound dour, it really isn't. In my experience, choosing happiness is often about being okay with whatever circumstances happen.
No, I'm not an published writer or financially well off or spending my spare time traveling the world, but what I am is a gifted writer with a love of the written word, more or less financially stable and not sinking, and blessed enough to travel at least a couple of times a year -- even if it's just in the states.
Life is usually about choices. Sometimes they're good choices. Sometimes they're bad choices. And right now, I'm choosing to be happy where I am.
The point of all this, as is often the case with my sage advice, is how important it is to invest your time wisely. I'm of the opinion that my time is valuable and when I spend that hard earned time on good people or good experiences, I am earning the reward of happiness. That seems more valuable than anything else. Though over this last weekend I could have chosen to be grumpy about the one thousand things I had to accomplish in only a few days but for all that hard work, I came out of it with a deeper love for my co-workers, whose consistent support me of and one another propels my days; a deeper love for my friends who are so wildly thoughtful and generous and creative; and finally a deeper love for my family, though while they can be at times very trying and impossible to love, understand me in a way that few others can claim and still manage to be in my corner.
It's so important.
All of that being said, as I've mentioned before, sometimes life is about making the hard choices, the ones that you don't want to make. Over the weekend, while I was visiting with my cousin, I had the not-so-unexpected bomb of hearing how absolutely my step-father, a person whom I've talked about at length previously, had no interest in spending any time with me. She repeated the words that he'd echoed to her earlier in the day "Oh, I don't want to spend any time with her.". Considering he hasn't spoken to me since probably February, this really didn't come as a massive surprise but it did hammer home how fractured and irreparable our relationship is at this point. It might perhaps might make me feel more brokenhearted to hear this if I didn't know that this was something he'd already done. Before my Mom got remarried, my step-dad had another son from his first marriage. He hasn't spoken to Brian in years. As a point of interest, he wasn't even invited to his own sons wedding.
My step-dad's choices have consistently been about himself. He chose his addiction over taking care of his family. He chose his addiction over having a relationship with his son. And as proved by his actions this weekend, he chose his addiction over me.
Am I sad about this? Not really. Am I disappointed? Absolutely. There will probably always exist some part of me that hopes beyond hope that someday he will be sober, that he will choose to be better and healthier and smarter about his choices but the realist in me knows that probably won't happen. I wasn't the first family member he cut out and I probably won't be the last.
So, I've let him go. There's nothing that I can do to force him into sobriety and he's both too stubborn and too proud to admit his fault in all this. And at the end of the day, that's the choice that I had to make for my own happiness and my own well being. It's the hard choice but it's the right one.
Until next time.
And on we go!
This last weekend, I had an inordinate amount of things to do. Between work and shindigs with friends and preparing for a family reunion in Nebraska, it seemed that what little free time I had was quickly and unceremoniously taken from me. While it certainly seems to the be the case lately that my life is just full of things and of obligations, I was just swamped with an endless list of tasks to accomplish. Here's the funny thing about that: by the end of it all, I felt not the slightest bit put out by this mountain of responsibilities. Though I normally have a penchant towards irritation (after all, I am a Slytherin and prone to bouts of pessimism and aggravation), when Saturday evening finally rolled around, after sitting around the fire with my cousins and nephews and family, a deep calmness swept over me. It's no small thing to be abundantly blessed with love. I am so full of love for my life and for my friends and for my family (at least the ones who deserve my time) that I could just burst.
How did I turn so sappy lately? Who am I? What in the actual shit is happening to me?! So much of my younger personality was centered on the idea that I was grumpy and pessimistic and only allowed my closest of close friends to see the shiny, bubbly, dorky me. To be quite honest, I think this version of myself is probably a bit better.
Late Saturday evening, long after some of my family members had gone to bed, I had the pleasure of just sitting by myself, Isabelle curled up by my side, listening to the fire crackle in front of me. Peace. There seem to be so few occasions where life is just silent, where the only sounds life gives are the ones that occur naturally. I read somewhere, and I couldn't tell you where, that some folks believe we're overrun with unnatural sound; that as an overdeveloped, over-full, over-saturated culture we have lost the connection with ourselves through silence.
I have to believe there's some merit to that: in that space, of quiet I came to a few conclusions.
Making peace with our unmet expectations seems to be an important part of growing older. We don't always get what we want or go where we want or become who we want. I certainly haven't. If you'd asked my eighteen year old self, fresh out of high school with both the air of superiority (because let's be honest: I was kind of a pain in the ass then) and a steadfast belief in my own ability to accomplish anything, what my life would be like at almost thirty, I don't think it would have been this. And that truth kind of stings a little bit. And while I recognize that this may sound dour, it really isn't. In my experience, choosing happiness is often about being okay with whatever circumstances happen.
No, I'm not an published writer or financially well off or spending my spare time traveling the world, but what I am is a gifted writer with a love of the written word, more or less financially stable and not sinking, and blessed enough to travel at least a couple of times a year -- even if it's just in the states.
Life is usually about choices. Sometimes they're good choices. Sometimes they're bad choices. And right now, I'm choosing to be happy where I am.
The point of all this, as is often the case with my sage advice, is how important it is to invest your time wisely. I'm of the opinion that my time is valuable and when I spend that hard earned time on good people or good experiences, I am earning the reward of happiness. That seems more valuable than anything else. Though over this last weekend I could have chosen to be grumpy about the one thousand things I had to accomplish in only a few days but for all that hard work, I came out of it with a deeper love for my co-workers, whose consistent support me of and one another propels my days; a deeper love for my friends who are so wildly thoughtful and generous and creative; and finally a deeper love for my family, though while they can be at times very trying and impossible to love, understand me in a way that few others can claim and still manage to be in my corner.
It's so important.
All of that being said, as I've mentioned before, sometimes life is about making the hard choices, the ones that you don't want to make. Over the weekend, while I was visiting with my cousin, I had the not-so-unexpected bomb of hearing how absolutely my step-father, a person whom I've talked about at length previously, had no interest in spending any time with me. She repeated the words that he'd echoed to her earlier in the day "Oh, I don't want to spend any time with her.". Considering he hasn't spoken to me since probably February, this really didn't come as a massive surprise but it did hammer home how fractured and irreparable our relationship is at this point. It might perhaps might make me feel more brokenhearted to hear this if I didn't know that this was something he'd already done. Before my Mom got remarried, my step-dad had another son from his first marriage. He hasn't spoken to Brian in years. As a point of interest, he wasn't even invited to his own sons wedding.
My step-dad's choices have consistently been about himself. He chose his addiction over taking care of his family. He chose his addiction over having a relationship with his son. And as proved by his actions this weekend, he chose his addiction over me.
Am I sad about this? Not really. Am I disappointed? Absolutely. There will probably always exist some part of me that hopes beyond hope that someday he will be sober, that he will choose to be better and healthier and smarter about his choices but the realist in me knows that probably won't happen. I wasn't the first family member he cut out and I probably won't be the last.
So, I've let him go. There's nothing that I can do to force him into sobriety and he's both too stubborn and too proud to admit his fault in all this. And at the end of the day, that's the choice that I had to make for my own happiness and my own well being. It's the hard choice but it's the right one.
Until next time.
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