Life Stuff (I'm not so good at coming up with titles...)

The last year has been hard. Really hard. Yet, it’s also been needed on so many levels. I left Phoenix a little over a year ago, and moved to an area that I was completely unfamiliar with and where I literally knew one person. By the way, the one person that I knew was best friends with my baby sister and she had just moved out to Portland a few months before me. We didn’t really have much of an established friendship, and had kind of gotten off to a rocky start.  

I left Phoenix for my job. Or at least that’s what I told everyone. My job was moving me out to Portland for a year, so that I could take care of the three big customers that we had up here. It was an easy way to leave. I needed to leave. My heart had been torn apart during the last few years that I was there.

I was in a relationship with a man that I never should have been. I let him so far into my world, and when it came time to face the music about our relationship I was left to face the music on my own. We both had consequences, there’s no doubt, but I’m the one that was ridiculed and blamed very openly. Everyone had an opinion about how I should handle moving forward, with very little sensitivity to the fact that in the midst of all of this I’d single-handedly destroyed my self-esteem, my reputation and shattered my heart. I literally felt like a piece of my soul had been removed from me.

I felt like too many people had a microscope on my life. There were people who used to be kind to me, and they just weren’t anymore. People that didn’t know me that thought I was an awful human being. People that looked at my like my choice defined everything about me. People that had been in a very similar situation that told me how horrible and messed up I was for getting in that situation, and yet clearly had a hard time looking in the mirror. There were also people who hugged me, loved me, and stood beside me in my darkest moments. There’s something about experiencing that level of shame that can expose the realest things about the friendships you have with people.

The weeks and months following I did everything I could to move forward. I cried, a lot. I was taking care of the most perfect little girl at the time and there were days when I couldn’t make it a few minutes before the tears took over again. I don’t know how I would have gotten through that part of my life without having her unconditional love every day. I had the greatest friends that a person could ask for, and even when I’m sure they were tired of hearing about how badly it hurt, they stood beside me and wiped the tears from my face.

 A new job would lead me to different customers in the Phoenix area, and there were customers that had locations close to him. There were days when I’d go to visit those customers and I’d spend twenty minutes talking myself into getting out of my car. I’d have to figure out how to breathe, because I felt like my lungs were going to collapse. I’d eventually get the tears to stop falling, clean myself up and then slowly get out of the car. I always rushed these appointments because I had a desperate need to get out of his neighborhood as quickly as possible. I never really thought I’d run into him, but I didn’t really know what I’d do if I did. I was constantly terrified.

For a long time I plastered a smile on my face, and did my best to fake it until I felt like I was making it. I still have days when I cry myself to sleep. Like the day that I found out he was getting married. I felt like my earth had shattered around me. Not because I wanted to be married to him, or that I wanted to be with him in any way, but because I was so pissed that he could so easily move forward while I still spent so much time punishing myself.

Everyone has a different way of dealing with the hard knocks of life. My way of dealing with life is to eat myself happy. Well, the other consequence of dealing with life this way, is that I also ate myself fat. Which is so fitting, considering that I decided a long time ago that if I was fat I wasn’t lovable. I found other ways to abuse and punish myself, and I have kept it up for three years. I will have moments where I’ve decided to get back on track, but it doesn’t take long before I’ve found reasons to hurt myself all over again. 

I had a friend ask how I was doing with the move after I’d been up here for a few months, and I revealed to her at that time how I’d realized how much I genuinely disliked my own company. I hated being alone, because then it was just me with my thoughts. The thoughts that constantly reminded me that I’m an awful person and that I didn’t deserve to experience what I’ve longed to experience my whole life: a man that genuinely loves me and a family. (Disclaimer: Just to be clear I am in no way declaring that I'm desperate for that to happen. It's simply one of the things that I've always wanted. My life has never been defined by having a man in my life or not, and if I am to get in to a relationship...I want it to be with someone who enhances my life, just as I would want to enhance theirs.)

Mistakes happen, and I get that. Yet, I’ve spent so much of my life and my energy ensuring that I did everything I could to keep people happy. That I lived up to their standards and that they were completely aware of how good my heart was, and one choice changed a lot of that. The biggest change was how I viewed my own heart though. I’ve learned a lot in the last few years that I am the only person who can genuinely determine what kind of heart I have. People are going to have opinions no matter what I do, and yet the only power those opinions have is the power I give them.

I’ve been focused on mastering self-love for the last few months. It’s hard. Really freaking hard. Some days I look in the mirror and I fall crazy in love with myself, and then the very next day I look at myself and find every single flaw. The greatest gift of working on this, and spending more energy with the idea of self-love, is that I’ve allowed myself to be more open to the idea of other people actually loving me. The craziest part…is that there have been people in my life for forever that have loved me all along. I have had moments when I’m really honest with myself, and I know that it’s because of WHO I am that I have so many people in my life that love me in ways that I never thought possible.

Forgiveness is necessary. I get to forgive others and more importantly I get to forgive myself. After all, I’m just a human being. I was bound to make mistakes, and if I choose, I get to be an even stronger woman having had those experiences.

I am worthy. I am enough. I am LOVE!