I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to get comfortable in my skin, my thoughts, my irrational adoration of black clothing. I’ve had this blog since 2001 in one form or another, and most of it is scribblings about my quest. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what its always been. My diary on the road to happy, to my own riddle being solved.

I’ve jotted down several pages of notes in one of my infamous yellow tablets over the past several days, some random quotes and musings from and inspired by two books I’ve just finished reading during a long weekend to celebrate The Mc flipping the old’ odometer and hitting 40. Thoughts I’d stashed away and need to revisit and explore. Challenges for myself, and for you.

I hope I intend for these notes to morph magically (because honestly, I’m so TIRED) into one of many posts I’m regularly throwing up (double entendre not lost on me) in the coming days and months about my journey towards healing and improvement of my heart and soul. I’m committing to myself to post again, and (as inspired by Honey & Jam), to have Wordless Wednesday, as well. I’m not committing to them being worth reading. In fact, you may want to save yourself the frustration and unbookmark/unsubscribe now.

Today? We start with baby steps wherein I reveal that I did 3 things in the last month that scared me. Scratch that, they rattled me. They took everything I had to quiet the nagging voices in the back of my mind that say (with regularity I’d rather not admit) that I’m not good enough, smart enough, talented enough. Ultimately, it was a grizzly scene with a mental machete that did them in, which meant I could do these things anyway. And I did. One attacked a decade old personal goal, one addressed an opportunity for professional growth, and one was for my future self – or who I think she might be.

It could turn out that none of them yield life changing results, but the fact that I did them at all is life changing enough. Because you know what? They didn’t kill me…and they will undoubtedly lead me ever closer to determining: What in the hell am I doing here, anyway?

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The books you have to thank for churning up an angry nest of voices in my head that are about to be unleashed on this poor, unsuspecting blog:

If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You

The Happiness Project

While my debt (*cough* thanks ex husband *cough*) had me working a second job a couple of nights a week, I had few complaints. My affordable 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath apartment was in a bustling and alive part of town, and it was painfully charming with its squeaky hardwoods, eat in kitchen and spacious back deck — ideal for writing under a canopy of leaves, among screaming squirrels and birds.

My rub with relationships then wasn’t a source of panic or frustration or desperation – it was one of annoyance and whybotheritis. I’d met and spent time with smart and wonderful men, they just didn’t fit me and I didn’t fit them.

Cut to: my seester.

My seester with a brain as giant as her overly generous heart, with her masters in forensic psychology and her multiple life-coach certificates. My sister, who always has time for one of my rambling ranty calls from across the continent.

As we spoke one afternoon, I imagined her in her LA garden surrounded by bougainvillea and under the orange tree near the guest cottage/her office.

“Go to your happy place.” she said, and I nearly choke-laugh which really isn’t that funny since I’m pretty sure I was driving at the time. “Do you have one? Maybe a park? Maybe a diner? Go there. Go there and bring paper with you and a pen – this can’t be done on a computer, there’s something primal and healing about the depression a pen makes in paper.”

I’m skeptical but intrigued and then skeptical some more, because I feel like there’s a hidden camera in the mix somewhere and I’m about to make a complete fool of myself.

“Make a list.” she tells me. I may have scrunched my nose or rolled my eyes or both.

“Make a list of what the perfect mate looks like – and I don’t mean physical attributes though a few of those are fine, too. I mean what kind of person are they?”

I’m at a loss, and I flashback to a seminar class I had in high school where there were no right or wrong answers but I still felt like every one I could conjure up was not only complete stinky BS, but also horribly wrong.

As if feeling the trepidation rattle in me via our shared DNA, she throws one out one of hers to get me started: “He walks up behind me at the kitchen sink on a Saturday morning when I have rat-nest hair and yuck mouth and tells me I’m beautiful and I believe him.”

“Oh shit,” I remember thinking, “that’s good. I’m using that.” She throws a few more at me and we hang up with the “I love you’s” we’ve been saying for thirty years.

Two days later on my lunch break I head to a park near my office with a blanket, my pen and one of my trusty yellow tablets. I’m still looking around for a suspicious van loaded with zoom lenses ready to capture my idiocy, and embark on the task reluctantly. The next thing I know there are 5 pages of requirements: heartfelt and goofy, they’re representative of things I’d had and never wanted again, things I had and wanted again, things I’d never had.

A few weeks passed and I’d already forgotten the list, the exercise, the trauma of waiting to show up on AFV or a list of Darwin Award nominees when I met The Mc at a social event. I watched from a distance…kind. Confident without being cocky. Laughed openly and freely. Handsome.

There were several weeks of awkwardness that followed before I gave him the nudge he needed to ask me out, and when he did I had circled back around to the list – I was armed and ready with my modern day Santa/cookie demands.

Some might say “the rest is history”, but I usually try not to be that big of an ass hat.

The 4 ½ years since haven’t been all ice cream and cool ocean breezes with sizzling sunsets, and the fact is I have no guarantee the he won’t grow weary of my shenanigans a month from now and kick me to the curb (though I don’t think he will). What I do know is it’s pretty great, and that having the list was no coincidence.

If you’re having a hard time wrapping your brain around it, humor me a bit longer and let me hit you with an analogy. When you need a new pair of jeans, where do you go? Knowing that we each have our own answer, I ask you next, where would you go if you’d never had a pair of jeans. If you’d never SEEN jeans? If you’d never even HEARD of jeans? You might end up at U-Haul rental or a florist or a recycling center. Right? Because you don’t even know what you’re LOOKING FOR.

Same deal.

So just now, I’m writing all this out for you on a yellow tablet in another of my happy places, with a sliver of Sunday morning sun sneaking through the cracks of two tall buildings. The sun is finding its way to my pale, rickety legs while I sip coffee and worry about you.

I’m writing this in case you’re lonely and trying to make something or someone fit that doesn’t. I’m writing it for you in case you’re lost and frustrated.

I’m writing it for us – that we might appreciate what we have or have not, as a reminder that if we focus, if we breathe, if we have patience – we will find what we’re looking for…if we know what we’re looking for.

“With every goodbye we go to seed again, this is how we come to make family from strangers, this is how we learn ‘always’, we are candles lit from each other.”

I’ve butchered a poem that held me enraptured in my teenage years, one that resonated with me and made my bones vibrate with an understanding of grief I didn’t realize anyone else was capable of. Here it’s like cheap beef stew meat in a styrofoam boat – still delicious but not nearly as much as if you’d been given the entire mess of meat to do admire.

Just the same, the words are still there. Sixteen years since I lost my mother, fourteen since I lost my father. Now I stand on the sidelines of life’s gymnasium – watching people I love find their rhythm in the dance of the mourning. I’m just the awkward girl with the glasses, the lazy eye and the ill-fitting dress, they’re the football quarterbacks trying to figure out what to do with their hands and attempting to look relaxed.

We all suck at this. We’re supposed to. It’s not supposed to be easy or come naturally, it’s supposed to ravage us and spin us around, and when we get our equilibrium back in check, when we can focus on the horizon again without tipping over, we’ll see a present there with pretty little bow.

If there’s one gift those I’ve/we’ve recently lost have graciously and silently granted, it’s their example of this: live. Work hard, and live the life you want to live.

Bill spent the last 20 years on a lake almost every day, fishing. He shared his passion and his love with his grandchildren, his friends, and his wife of 60 years. Karleen spent the last 16 years cooking, baking, visiting with friends and family, and driving her sister half mad (*giggle*). She died in the same house she was born in – the house her father built, on the farm he owned and worked, and it was exactly how she wanted it to be.

While I’m still trying to figure out how to balance the greedy “want” from the soul filling, world rewarding “want” and what that means for my actions, activities, hobbies, etc., I’ve found yet another quote to pin to my mental lapel (in hopes others will see it even without seeing it):

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.” – Ernst Fischer

51 posts. In 2009, I watched this blog crash and burn.

I started this damn thing nearly ten years ago. TEN YEARS. Back then I was writing up posts in Notepad (light coding, mind you) and FTPing up static files. I converted to Blogger. I later converted to WordPress, and spent hours in a bar with Dave and Paulie helping me fix things that broke during the move.

Somewhere in there I met The Mc, continued to heal in grueling, Kleenex abusing weekly therapy sessions, and subsequently found myself with less time to write and less things I needed to purge.

I counted a few weeks ago and found I’d only written/posted 51 times last year, as opposed to an average of 300+ in the years prior.

Unsure of what 2010 holds, I’m still thinking about the blog. I’m thinking about and missing writing, I’m thinking about and missing the things that used to make me write. I’m also thinking about all the effing self-censoring I’ve been doing that has stood in the way of writing. Oh, but the list of excuses goes on and on: the cats won’t let me sit without wanting to be petted, that I’d rather be with The Mc than write/run/walk/justaboutanythingconstructive. Twitter and Facebook which mean a shift in thinking complete coherent thoughts to thinking in 140 character summarizations. Then there’s the other mostly secret blog I’m keeping about the big thing in our life I’m still not allowed to talk about. There’s watering the plants. Doing laundry. Running errands.

Meh.

This year, despite being off to a contradictory start, I’m going to try to do better.

For me.