Feet on the ground

Sometimes, I struggle with what I'm going through.  It's not the easiest to go from not having a hope in the world to having something to look forward to.

It's a long uphill battle coming out of the failures of the past.  It's something that while you're doing it doesn't seem so huge, but little observances of interesting moments along the way that make it worthwhile.  Then one day, poof! You're back on your feet like nothing bad ever happened to you.

I'm going through one of those times now where I kind of feel out of sorts, that no matter what I do at the moment, things just aren't quite going in the direction that I'd like them to.

It's odd.  I have always been someone who hits the ground running.  And whether it's me running into walls or some idiotic thing that I keep being so glad that there is no one really here with me as I stub toes and holler out strings of obscenities as my clumsy nature gets the best of me.  I'm just glad no one is here with a video camera, because I'd assuredly be a laugh riot from the silliness that befalls me day after day.  But, I'm not sure if it's my clumsiness or what, but I just can't quite seem to gain traction at the moment.  I don't know why that is.  I kind of feel lost.

Right now, the apartment is fairly empty.  Just me.  We know this, I've covered it how many times now?  But, it's coming along because it's not just me and the empty walls now.  Somehow, I found an unlikely roommate called hope.  As I'm clumsily getting through every day life, I keep running into my hopes as I'm doing things around my living space.  It's the Lichtenstein on my bedroom wall of "The Drowning Girl", the polka dotted sheets on my bed, the peaceful ocean blue of my comforter along with the rest of the unique furnishings I bought a year ago to wash away the remnants of the trauma I had faced.  Now, those things are a part of my life every day.  They're things that make me smile when I see them and it reminds me to have hope.   I think in moments like these, when things are out of focus, they give you a chance to reassess everything, taking it all in and going through the mental checklist on the "what do I want" list to see if you've made any progress.

Have I made any progress?  Right now it doesn't feel like it.  But, I'm guessing that a year from now, I'll look back at this moment and realize my feet were on the ground and I was gaining traction but didn't know it yet.

But, I keep thinking, maybe it's the darkness before the dawn.  Maybe my next great adventure is just biding its time until it lands squarely in my lap and sets my problem-solving skills on fire to get through it all.  I don't know really.  But I'm patient.  I can wait.  I've spent 38 years on this planet, I don't think another day, week or year is going to make much difference at this point.  Patience is all I really have.  I can't get in a hurry to get into the next adventure, that only brings problems and unneeded drama.  No, patience is best right now.

My mother says that there are a lot of people who are going through just what I am.  They've hit the year mark after their spouse has hit the door and they're feeling just as I am now.  Battling nights filled with anxiety, dreading the next ill thing that comes their way through the courtesy of their exes.  There are moments where I'm grateful that another girl was brought in to replace me so that way I didn't have to deal with all of the little things that drove me so crazy during the course of the seven years I was married.  I often sit back with a voice in my head that says, 'let her deal with the mess'.  Other days, I realize I really don't miss my ex at all anymore, but I miss a person around that does things for me to laugh at, roll my eyes over or just sigh in annoyance, relief or joy.  It's the human element I miss.  Otherwise, I've been oddly enjoying not seeing all the things that I used to be blamed for on a daily basis, realizing that the apartment is much cleaner without him here.  Realizing that he was the slob, I wasn't.

Sometimes I sit amazed at the cleanliness of my bottle of laundry detergent.  Oh, go ahead laugh.  It's funny.  When the ex lived here, I always thought it so peculiar going into the laundry room and seeing the bottle of laundry detergent, with the little spigot on the end, caked over with dried on laundry detergent.  I was always mystified how it got that way.  Without fail, I'd take the bottle down off the shelf, put it in the sink and clean it all up.  After which, I would place it back upon the shelf and over the course of a few weeks, it would end up the same way again...with the evidence of his sloppy laundry habits showing up as a dotted line along the top of the washer in the form of carelessly flung droplets of laundry detergent.  Yesterday, as I was doing a quick load of laundry, I noticed something.  The spigot on the front of the bottle, it was clean as a whistle and it's stayed like that for the last fifteen months.  I stood there and just looked at it for a moment and said aloud, "Well, how friggin' hard is it to keep something that supposed to be cleaning your clothes actually clean?  Well, lookee there...I guess it's not."  Oh and I could tell repeat stories for every single bottle of hand soap in the house and the mysterious puddles that fifteen months ago would have found the nook behind every single sink faucet filled with water because someone just had to slosh water everywhere when they washed their hands.  By some miracle or freak of nature, all of those things have vanished.

But, there was one more remarkable thing that I've noticed that has vanished in the last fifteen months...the toilets don't stop up anymore.  He used to blame it on me.  Well, guess I know now that it's definitely not my fault what happened in THAT category.  One fact that can't be denied is that the apartment is different and it's for the sole reason that I'm the one who lives here and my messes aren't half bad.  Then again, do we ever think our own messes are so horrible?  I'm betting not.

Sometimes I think it takes a whole lot of time to be grateful for our own good habits.  Yesterday, I wrote a piece on bad habits.  Today it's time for observing the good ones.   It's the really positive ones where you know that you're stepping in the right direction, even though it may not feel like it at the moment.

Alas, a new day has come, let's find out what this one has to offer.  It's time for hope to wake up and bump into me once again.  I've got my feet on the ground and I'm moving forward.