This Virtue is Running Out of Steam

I have always been a patient person. I figured out long ago that very little in life is set up for instant gratification, and I’m a firm believer that some of the best things in life are that way precisely because they take some effort to get to. That’s not to say I don’t put my share of the work in; I have simply always been good at accepting that I can only do so much, and after I’ve done all I can possibly do sometimes the only thing left is the waiting.

Now, however, with all that has happened to me in the last ten months, I find my patience wearing very thin. It’s probably a byproduct of having to redirect all that patient energy into keeping myself together, but whatever the reason I am beginning to be a whole lot less graceful about the whole “waiting” thing. In short, I’m over it. I’m over the endless patience with people who don’t deserve it, I’m tired of the patience I’m supposed to be exhibiting with the universe as it works out major decisions that could make or break my life path, and I am sick unto death of being patient with myself. All the patience I have exhibited with the hand I’ve been dealt should just about qualify me for sainthood, but I will happily stick with just being me if I could get some action going and stop all this incessant waiting!

I do better with a plan. I do better with direction. And I do better with control. These three things have been sadly lacking in my life lately, at least at the levels I need to feel secure. I’m tired of feeling insecure about my life and where it’s headed. It bothers me that I can’t accurately predict where my life will sit a week from now. A week! I’m not even talking long-term planning here; I’m talking about a completely reasonable timeframe that most people can at least provide the highlights for. I got nothing. And it’s really starting to get on my nerves. It seems that, with so many endings in my life lately, all that stress (instead of dissipating) is focusing on an ever-smaller subsection of my life—a subsection that can and will change everything depending on how it goes. I’ll know something for sure by this time next week. An answer is on the horizon—but if it’s the wrong answer, I’m back to square one and more stressed out than ever.

Am I whining? A bit, I suppose. But if it were all sunshine and roses, I wouldn’t need The Reinvention Project.

Lesson of the Day: Whoever first said “patience is a virtue” left out the part about what to do when said virtue runs out!

Clean Slate

I never, ever thought that I would be starting over at this stage of my life. I had it all figured out. Career, education, family…everything was lined up and a bright future was on the horizon. My goals, dreams, aspirations—all coming together.

Until, suddenly, they weren’t.

Nine months ago my life went to hell in the space of 24 hours, and I watched all my dreams, all my hopes for my life, collapse around me. I was devastated. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the day, much less a week, or a month, or the indefinite amount of time it was going to take to come up with an entirely new future for myself. It seemed impossible. And, in those first dark months, I wasn’t sure I even had enough left in me to try.

But human nature is a powerful thing, and it has always been my nature to persevere. So, that’s what I did. Through the horrible days and the unbearable nights, through hours when I felt so alone I could only curl up on the floor and cry, through minutes when it literally felt like my heart was tearing its way through my chest because even it couldn’t take the pain anymore…I stuck it out. It wasn’t always pretty, and it sure as hell wasn’t easy, and some days I spent every second clawing my way to a goal I couldn’t even visualize yet, but here I am. I may not be whole, but I managed to hold on to all the pieces I need to put myself back together. I may have scars, but that only means that the wounds are healing. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to describe myself as naïve again, but knowledge is, and always has been, power.

So here I sit, situations finally resolved, endings finally written, and a blank slate before me. It’s a tiring thought, that I now have to rewrite the story of my future—luckily, stories are kind of my thing. The Reinvention Project is nowhere complete, but I can now add the element of freedom to my quest. No longer tied to my past, there’s nothing holding me back. It’s scary, but I’ve always enjoyed a challenge. The possibilities are limitless; with no one and nothing else to take into consideration, I can, quite seriously, do whatever I want with my life. I have never been in this position before, and I’m looking forward to seeing what I come up with.

I’m still weary, I’m still sad, I’m still healing—but with the last nine months as proof that I can get through anything, I have hope. And hope, as Pandora will tell you, can make all the difference in the world. It’s time to pick up my pen and get to work.

Lesson of the Day: It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life.

Time Out

Yesterday, I gave myself a time out.

No, I didn’t do anything wrong. But many of the most miserable things in my life are finally moving towards a definite end, and that movement has brought its own set of complications and stress. I was feeling overwhelmed, and found myself having more “off” days than “on” days. Since I am now painfully acquainted with where too many “off” days in a row lead me, I took control and made yesterday a “no life allowed” day.

No schoolwork. No dealing with any of the issues the universe has seen fit to saddle me with in the last eight months. Just me and the day, having a good time. And it worked. I slept in, catching up on some much-needed unconsciousness that a resurgence of my insomnia has been denying me. I had a leisurely breakfast. I did some early birthday shopping (gotta love all the coupons that appear in your mailbox when your birthday month rolls around!). I went and saw a movie—and, as an added bonus, had the entire theater to myself. I came home and had a nice dinner, watched all my favorite Thursday night shows on TV, ate some cheesecake, and rolled off to bed at a semi-decent hour. It was glorious.

So many hours of our lives are scripted. We get up, we have breakfast, we go to work. We work, we come home, we have dinner, we go to bed. Maybe there’s some school thrown in there, or maybe “work” is the 24/7 job of being a stay-at-home parent. It doesn’t matter. No matter how hard we work at living life, it’s so difficult to give ourselves permission to slack off. But the truth is that all the worries that are here today will likely not be made worse if you tell them to stuff it for 24 hours. The errands can go a day without being run. There will always be something to fill your day at work. In short, the world won’t end if you take a day off.

So why not reap the benefits of being able to recharge? It took a single day of doing things that make me happy to get my batteries back in the green. I’m feeling more confident, more capable, and ready to take on this next round of challenges. Let’s face it: we work hard at this life we’re trying to make for ourselves. Once in a while, we deserve a time out. The universe can wait.

Lesson of the Day: Skip a day, gain a positive outlook.

Time for a Change

It has been nearly four months since I started The Reinvention Project. It seems like such a short amount of time, and in the grand scheme of what I'm trying to accomplish I suppose it is. Still, I can say quite confidently that, for all the potholes (and sometimes craters) I've encountered so far, I have made progress along the road I chose on New Year's Eve.

I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has come across this humble blog. When I began I wasn't sure if anyone besides a few friends would check it out, and I never cease to be amazed (and thrilled!) when yet another follower signs on, another comment hits my inbox, or another word of encouragement comes to me from across the country. I have solid evidence that the Project is doing exactly what I dared hope it would do: making a difference. It may be a small difference, and it may be a few people, but to hear even one person say they have been bolstered by my words makes me feel like everything I'm going through can be given a positive purpose. That feeling, for me, is its own form of therapy.

I have, as Robert Frost put so eloquently, "miles to go before I sleep." But thanks to this blog, and everyone who’s taken the time to share it with me, I no longer feel like I'm traveling that road alone.

Lesson of the Day: We’re never as alone as we think we are.

Feeling Accomplished

One of the things that makes it easier for me to get through the day (particularly a rough day) is a feeling of accomplishment. I imagine this is pretty standard, and just about everyone probably feels this way. Should be easy, right? We all accomplish things all the time. Nevertheless, I have occasionally been surprised when, thinking back on my day, I can’t find a single moment to feel accomplished about. This, I have decided, is unacceptable, because sometimes those small gold stars on the chart of my life are the only positive things I have to reflect on at the end of the day—particularly as I’m still embroiled in the “post-disaster rubble” phase of the Reinvention Project.

So, I have made a point of checking in with myself midway through the day. Have I accomplished anything yet? Do I have anything to be proud of? If the answer is yes, I smile to myself and continue on with my day. If the answer is no, I step it up, flipping through the remaining hours of my day to see if there’s anything that will give me that fuzzy feeling once I check it off my list. At first it felt odd to be so deliberate about it; now, it’s second nature. Besides being good for my mental health (some people could do with a lot more mental checking in, if you ask me), this is my moment to breathe if I’ve been on the go, and remind myself that vacant idleness hasn’t gotten me anywhere good in the last seven months if I’m drifting.

The feeling of accomplishment doesn’t take much to trigger, either, which is why it’s so useful once you hone it. Did you complete a particularly tiring workout? Finish that book you’ve been meaning to read? Wrap up a project you’ve been slaving over? Did you get the house cleaned, or make an unusually satisfying meal, or take the dog for an extra-long walk? Did you shoot off an overdue email, reconnect with a friend you’ve been neglecting, or upload those pictures that have been sitting in your memory card? Everyone has different ideas of what an “accomplishment” entails, but I’m trying to illustrate that they don’t have to be epic to serve their purpose.

Sometimes, for me, just surviving the day is an accomplishment in itself. And I’m pretty accepting of that (I’ve had seven months of having it pounded into my psyche, after all). But on the good days, I expect more out of myself. So I do my best to make sure I’m never disappointed. And as long as I can confidently give myself that gold star at the end of the day, I’m good.

Lesson of the Day: The world may be short on gold stars, but that doesn’t mean you can’t craft your own!

An Overabundance of Perspective

Just when I think I have all the life perspective I can possibly handle, the universe finds a way to shove some more down my throat.

I have spent the last month dealing with the unraveling of one of the few aspects of my life that has remained more or less stable through this mess: my physical health. I went to the doctor in early February to get an explanation for some highly unpleasant symptoms I was experiencing, and came away with the number of a specialist and the name of the very cancer that killed my grandfather a few years ago echoing in my ears.

The wait between that initial doctor’s appointment and my appointment with the specialist was awful. The wait between the specialist’s appointment and the procedure he wanted to do to rule out cancer was even worse. I had to make a very unpleasant call to beg for a halt to some of the other things going on in my life (things that necessitated The Reinvention Project in the first place, and things I just want to END, not drag out) so I wouldn’t lose my medical insurance. I had flashbacks to when my grandfather died. I had nightmares about having cancer, and all the things that could go wrong. I ran scenarios in my mind about whether I’d even be able to handle such a blow after all the blows I’ve already taken. If there was anything that would trump every other disaster in my life that I’ve been clawing my way through, it would be a cancer diagnosis.

This last Tuesday I found myself being checked in to the hospital, with a friend beside me who I will love forever for stepping in to fill the void left by the person who decided seven months ago that standing by my side was no longer a job description they wanted. This friend stayed with me until the second I was wheeled away for my procedure, suffering through my inevitable freak-out at being in the hospital and having an IV put into my arm (even typing the words makes my heart rate go up—I do not do well with hospitals, and have a phobia of needles that makes all things medical akin to psychological torture for me). She was also the first face I saw and the first voice I heard when I came out of anesthesia afterwards, and though I’ve forgotten the bulk of what happened between when they first gave me the anesthesia and when I was wheeled out of the hospital to my friend’s car due to the medication’s effects on my short-term memory, I will never, as long as I live, forget that her presence kept me calm and feeling not alone.

Feeling “not alone” while you’re waiting to hear if you have cancer is a very, very important thing.

And, as it turns out, I do NOT have cancer. I had something else, which has since healed, and I am as healthy as I ever was. But in that short amount of time when the possibility loomed, I gained yet more perspective on this life I’m trying to rebuild from the ground up. Hence today’s lesson…

Lesson of the Day: Living may sometimes suck, but the alternative is unacceptable.

All the Little Things

Oddly enough, it takes very little to make me smile these days. I suppose that when every major aspect of your life goes so completely wrong, the little things are all you have left. There are many things I used to take for granted, things that I never acknowledged in any significant way for the happiness they brought to my life. But now, those days are over.

The last seven months have taken me to depths of despair I never knew existed, depths I’m not yet nearly far enough away from. That sounds overly dramatic, doesn’t it? Well, dramatic or no, it’s the truth. It feels as though I have become the universe’s very own punching bag, particularly when the remaining stable areas of my life are picked off one by one like some sort of cosmic game of Duck Hunt (which has happened more than once in the last month). So, the big things have become, to understate, unreliable sources of happiness.

Fine. Screw the big things. Life isn’t about the big things, anyway, is it? This jumbled string of minutes that makes up our days is full of small moments and things, seemingly insignificant, that create the massive whole we’re all a part of. And if I am going to have any hope of getting through this disaster that stubbornly insists on not ending, I no longer have the luxury of ignoring them. For example:

~ A sunny day. It was unseasonably gorgeous outside today, and I was so grateful for the opportunity to put my to-do list on hold, grab a book, and sit outside to enjoy it.

~ Chocolate chip cookies made from scratch. Chewy, just the way I like them, and enough of a stockpile to get me through a rough week.

~ A good TV show. There’s nothing like being able to escape into another world for an hour or so, to take a temporary break from reality.

~ Planners. I love whoever invented the planner. I would never get anything done if it weren’t for mine!

~ Candlelight. Such a small thing, so easily accessed, and it never fails to soothe me.

~ A good pair of running shoes. Working out my troubles while pounding the pavement has gotten me through more than one impossible day.

~ Granny Smith apples. One of my favorite fruits, and my current snack of choice. Especially with some salt sprinkled on the slices.

~ A favorite book. Like old friends, and even better than a good show, I have a few beloved works that I turn to whenever I really need to get out of my head. They never let me down.

~ Flip-flops. That’s right, flip-flops. They signal warm weather, and it makes me incredibly happy to be able to bust them out of their winter hibernation.

Are these large, life-altering things? No. Do they completely balance out the misery I sometimes feel smothered in? Not really. But they do shine tiny beams of light through the darkness. And if I pay close enough attention to the light, sometimes I can forget the darkness for a little bit. It’s a lesson I’m getting better and better at adhering to, and one that I plan to take with me and hold close no matter what the future holds. Because I have found that there really is value in occasionally stopping to smell the roses.

Lesson of the Day: Sometimes, it’s the small things in life that make life worth living.