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 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.

Sorting Out My Priorities

It has been, to put it mildly, a rough few weeks. A lot of that waiting I talked about a few posts ago took a giant step forward, and instead of being relieved I found myself relapsing into a depressive episode on a level I honestly thought I was beyond. So, I can now personally attest to another truth about depression: it is entirely possible to experience a relapse. (For more information on depression, see my January 28, 2010 post, Taking Down Depression.) No wonder it’s known to be such an insidious illness.

At any rate, there has been a lot of “just making it through” going on, and that hasn’t left me with either the energy or desire for much of anything else. The tactics I’ve been using for the last six months to keep my head on straight aren’t as effective as they used to be. My patience for all this *waves arms around wildly* is waning. It’s time to step up The Reinvention Project. I’ve decided to try to think a bit further into the future; to look to the ever-nebulous “other side” I will supposedly come out on when everything making my life a whirlwind of discontent finally resolves itself. If I can visualize this new life of mine, maybe it will be easier to hold out for it. To that end, I decided to make a list.

I jumped on to http://www.tadalist.com/, a lovely website devoted to list-making, and created the following:

Adventures for 2010
~ hot air balloon ride
~ skydiving on my birthday
~ hiking to waterfalls in the spring
~ run three 5Ks
~ join a writers group

The first three items are things I’ve been dying to do for years, and the opportunities just didn’t present themselves in my old life (I have a specific state park in mind for the hiking). The last two items are geared towards personal improvement for the benefit of my new life. The important thing about this list is that each thing is completely do-able this year. Only the first two items cost any significant amount of money, and neither cost is prohibitive.

One of the facets of my new life that I’m most eager to incorporate is not waiting so long to do the things I truly want to do. One of the hard lessons I’ve learned is that life is unpredictable. You can have it all planned out one day, and not know which way is up the next. Life itself will get in the way of you doing any actual living if you let it. As I am rebuilding from the ground up, now seems like the perfect time to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore. The things I want to do, the adventures I want to have, are going to take a much higher priority in my new life. That knowledge is getting me through when other distractions fail.

The above list-in-progress will seem inane to most people, I imagine. Plenty of people couldn’t care less about waterfalls, and relatively few have the urge to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. But are you prepared to deny that you have such a list in the back of your mind? If you sat down right now with a pen and paper, what small things have you been dying to do, or try, or see, that you keep putting off? Forget about expensive dream vacations (Rome is on my personal long-term wish list) or the desire to change careers. Think smaller. Is there a play you want to see? A favorite band in concert? Have you always wanted to try a particular craft? Maybe you have a secret desire to try an online computer game. Or go to a tasting at a local winery.

You think about these things from time to time, and each time you think to yourself, “Someday soon I’m actually going to make this happen. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.” But soon never seems to arrive, and the months pass, and the years pass, and life gets in the way of all your best intentions. It happens to us all. My list has been with me for years. But you know what? Six months ago that list was longer. I’ve already begun to check things off. And each checkmark is another completion of something important to me. Something that makes my life richer, more colorful. And isn’t that the point of life, after all? To live it?

Lesson of the Day: Life is for living. Make it happen.

Who Am I?

I will never again be the person I was six months ago.

This is one of the more psychologically difficult truths to accept as I delve deeper into The Reinvention Project. In small ways, we are constantly changing. That’s the beauty of humanity—our capacity for transformation, for adaptation, for growth in every sense of the word. It’s a trait to be embraced—but I’m speaking on a much larger scale.

There have definitely been some surface changes in the sum of what makes me, me. My tastes in music have shifted in notable (and perhaps predictable) ways. There’s no telling how long it will be before I can listen to fluffy pop music again without sneering (and, really, what did Colbie Caillat ever do to me?). I’ve always enjoyed Breaking Benjamin, but I have lately found a connection to their undeniably apt lyrics that I find oddly cathartic. (Feeling angsty? Pull out Dear Agony, their latest album. It’s magnificent.) There are music groups I have always adored and now can’t stand, simply for their connotations. Hell, there’s an entire country that, when referenced (and it is, with appalling frequency), has the power to reduce me to tears. And movies? Don’t even get me started on movies. Let’s just say Bruce Willis a la Die Hard and Harrison Ford a la Indiana Jones are getting a serious workout in my DVD player these days.

But these types of changes, which can happen under a nearly infinite number of circumstances, some completely benign, are not the only differences I’m contending with. There are certain fundamental shifts in my very personality, in the deepest core of who I am, that could never have happened except under life-altering circumstances—circumstances I never anticipated, but am nonetheless dealing with. These are the changes I’m grappling with the most.

To be perfectly frank, this angers me to levels I didn’t even know I was capable of. I’ve always been quite sure of who I am. I liked who I was six months ago. I was a well-rounded, stable, compassionate, loyal individual who loved deeply and lived happily. That some force outside of me affected such changes so deep within me feels like the worst possible invasion of my being. It disgusts me, and in my darker moments I’m furious with myself for allowing anything or anyone to weasel their way inside me so completely that they were even able to accomplish such an utter destruction of the components essential to who I am. So I struggle, daily, with this concept of the now-gone “old” me versus the in-progress “new” me.

Yet another facet of The Reinvention Project, then, is the sometimes uncomfortable and almost always exhausting notion of figuring out who I am, of reacquainting myself with, well, myself. The opportunities for doing this seem to appear at the most surprising of times, mostly when I find myself reacting to something in ways my “old” self never would have. In class tonight, we were discussing the book “Thirteen Reasons Why,” a young adult novel that deals with the topics of teen depression and suicide. I found myself, in the face of several classmates who were less than impressed with the book, vehemently defending it. Their arguments revolved around the character who commits suicide. Her reasons, they said, were not enough. Surely someone as supposedly intelligent as this character would never have been depressed to the point of suicide over such tiny things. Their (obviously uninformed) assumptions about depression, which the “old” me had no personal experience with, as well as their comments on the “intelligence” factor of people who consider suicide, had my hackles up immediately, and I found myself having to refrain from an all-out rant on just what depression can do to a person.

Depression is a topic on which the me of six months ago would have had nothing informed to say. The new me, however, apparently has a lot to say (fodder for future posts, no doubt), and my reaction in class has been food for thought all evening—and, as you can guess, prompted the theme of this post. Yes, I have changed, in ways I’m only just beginning to recognize. I’m trying to take such revelations as they come, without letting them overwhelm me. It’s not easy—but what about rebuilding yourself from the ground up is?

Lesson of the Day: Being in the dark makes the sudden beams of light that much brighter, and sometimes the most you can do is throw on the sunglasses.

The Genesis of The Reinvention Project

Sometimes life, for better or worse, presents us with the chance to change some aspect of our lives or our selves. Whether we have chosen the circumstances or had them thrust upon us, the opportunity is there for the taking—the question becomes, then: what will we do about it? I find myself searching for the answer to this very question after a recent series of events has left me standing amidst the ruins of a life that, quite suddenly and painfully, has ceased to exist.

As a new year approaches, I find the theme of new beginnings more apt than ever before. The path of my old life is ended; the path of my new life is undetermined. I stand at a place I never thought I’d be again: square one. My questions far outweigh my answers: Do I have the strength for this? Who am I? Who do I want to be? What do I want out of this new life? What should I attempt to salvage from my old life? What should I let go? What will the end result look like?

More important than any of these questions, however, is this: what can I learn from this experience? Empty pain is destructive; pain that leads to meaning, however—that is my goal.

Thus, The Reinvention Project is born.

How many people are in the same position I’m in? Faced with having to start over, to rebuild after the end of a life they would have happily continued living forever? How many people are wishing they could change something about themselves, or about their lives, but don’t feel they have the strength or resources to do so? How many people have finally decided to make a change or two, but feel overwhelmed or alone in their quest? They say there’s nothing new under the sun—I plan to add my voice to the masses.

Through this blog, I plan to chronicle my journey to a new life. I’ll post all that I learn in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will be able to take what I discover and use it to improve their own lives. If even a single person can use a single sentence to take a single step towards being happier, I will consider my journey a worthwhile endeavor.

It’s a new year—and my one resolution is to make it count.