On a rare night home alone I started thinking back to the days when I had time to wax poetic on this blog and how, for a time, I shared my thoughts and life on here thinking others might enjoy reading about them. Then social media in the form of Facebook, and all it's fantastic diversions, exploded.
Just as my life, as I knew it, imploded.
Pretty much in the same year.
.
Throughout that painful transition, which took several years in whole, I would try to visit this blog and re-launch it, and was met many a time with some incredibly potent emotional land mines. Or I didn't feel like writing about the way I was feeling about the world. Or, more often than not, I didn't feel safe writing what I was really thinking or feeling. And censorship took its toll.
The well dried up.
The blog died.
Tonight though, I found my way back here after much digging around to find the passwords to email accounts with addresses reflective of another life...another identity...another me.
Truly a lifetime ago.
And quite honestly sometimes I don't really even recognize the woman who traded in her dreams so willingly, so that others might have theirs.
It took quite a hostile takeover for me to learn that balance means that no one else's needs being met, should ever trump another's.
Now when I take a virtual stroll over to this blog it feels like I am visiting an old friend, someone who knows all my secrets and passions and dreams from days gone by, yet, its been so long, and so much has transpired since last we wrote, that we need to catch up because she has no idea of all the wondrous ventures in which I have been partaking the past several years.
When last I posted here, I was dating a wonderful man for around 1.5 years, whose love and patience with us, and for me, taught me everything about how to love and trust again, and how to believe in a path forward, with the knowledge that when I reach out my hand he will gladly take it.
Every. Single. Time.
That man became my husband last month, with each of us hoping that the third time is, in fact, the charm. And while we lead a simple existence by most people's standards, we also have learned that really all we have is this very moment in time. And every day I find myself marveling at how in the world I got to be so lucky to have ended up here.
And then I think...
Because it isn't luck.
It's resilience.
It's perseverance.
It's a skill set passed down from generations before me.
It's taking something really truly hard and miserable and being brave enough to sit in the muck. It's resting and rebuilding until you are ready to start searching for the silver lining.
Until one day it just leaps right out for you in spite of yourself.
Once in my darkest days, a friend told me the most amazing thing his grandfather once said to him as he was going through a difficult time.
If you think you are blazing a trail, just look down at your feet and you will see the beaten path forged by all the footsteps of those who have gone before you.
Those words will stick with me forever and a day.
I have many more tales to share of love, of struggle, of a career I never imagined would find me.
But for today I just wanted to stop by and say, hello, old friend. I haven't forgotten you. And I promise not to wait so long before we meet again.
