i’m back…

It has been far too long…

Transitions. They are good, they are bad, they are happy, they are sad, I rhyme. As ridiculous as that last sentence was, it’s true. When we make a decision to transition into something, be it a new job, house, or town, we are first and foremost moving forward because it is going to bring about a positive change and most likely we will be leaving behind negative stressors in some form or another.

As exciting as the idea of something new is, I will always have those tugging emotions, that little angel on my right shoulder, and devil on my left… The angel is sitting there keeping me happy and positive and exciting me about all of the new things I’m going to do and everything that I am looking forward to. But then the devil, and I don’t look at him as an evil devil, I guess not really a devil at all. He’s more of the sad little child in all of us saying, “but wait! what about…?”. There is always going to be something we have to leave behind, whether it is a person, an object, an apartment, a car, whatever. The point is, not everything can come with you.

I am in the process of transitioning, my Mother and Father are in the process of transitioning, and my Sister is in the process of transitioning. Oddly enough the transitions aren’t fully related, and they mean something different to each of us. All I know is, it’s going to be fine. We are going to make it, even though life gets really hard, we are still standing here. Maybe that is all we need to do. Look back on those tough decisions we made in the past and how troubled we were when we were making them, and sometimes how crushed we were by their weight. But then flash forward to this very second, and you realize, you are still standing.

 

Lost Along the Way

I’ve come to realize that if I do not get a thought out of my head the second it begins to take its second spin, it only intensifies and creates a home for itself. Will I still ruminate? Definitely. Will it ease slightly? Hopefully.
I have felt for awhile now that I need to get myself back. What do I want? Where do I want to go? What types of people do I want to surround myself with? What is most important to me?
I need to come back to the place where I am genuinely myself, without hesitation and the worry about what other people are thinking and doing. Their actions only affect me if I allow them to dig themselves deep inside of me, and that is a choice. Yes, no matter what happens you will always have a feeling about it, you can’t just shut feelings off, but you can decide how you will let them affect you.
I need to get excited about life again. For the past two years it has taken every part of my being and more to just keep my head above water. Now that I feel more stable in all aspects of my life, it’s time for me to evaluate what makes me happy and what brings positivity into my life.
By identifying what brings me happiness, I will in turn discover what brings negativity. Even if something has positive aspects it can still be predominately negative and those are the things I need to start weeding out of my life, even if it seems difficult to let go of the small amount of happiness it brings.
By losing myself I lost my passion for every day life and the small joys that each day can bring. This is what saddens me most of all. It’s time for me to bring my attention inward to begin to learn who I’ve become. I know that I am going to meet a very different person, but at least that person will be authentic.

“You’re not really an adult at all. You’re just a tall child holding a beer, having a conversation you don’t understand.” — Dylan Moran

when do we decide to stop turning the other cheek?

We all have been in this dilemma plenty of times where someone has hurt us and we have to make the decision to either try to forgive them and move forward or to tell someone how you really feel. I’ve done both many times and I’m realizing the way I feel after is pretty much the same.

When I attempt to understand and move forward I end up bottling up these tiny resentments that then build to a huge explosion at some random point in time. When I tell someone how I’m feeling, they usually make excuses that anger me more because they aren’t understanding that I just want them to acknowledge how I feel. Either way I don’t feel understood, or like my feelings matter at all.

By constantly ignoring every situation in which someone has hurt you, you can become someone who people can easily take advantage of. If you are open with your feelings people sometimes aren’t as receptive as you wished they would be and then you feel the dynamic between you begin to shift because people don’t like to be told when they are wrong. Obviously I have been on both sides, the one who has been hurt and the one who has done the hurting. I’ve also picked both choices in how I reacted to the situation. I can honestly say I don’t know which one is the best choice. Do we really gain anything from either? If someone you thought was your friend can’t acknowledge your feelings, even if they don’t think they did anything wrong, then who was that person to you in the first place?

All I know is people wish to be heard and they wish for their feelings to be validated and respected.

do we ever really let go?

I have a terrible habit of ruminating. It is something I try to let go of but the habit has been embedded in my mind for years and it is hard to break. The past few months have been… an experience. Random nights I stumble upon an email from an ex-boyfriend, an old message from a friend, sometimes I look through my journal and I am reminded of so many experiences, conversations, arguments, what have you. Did I “forget” these memories? Technically I guess I did, but being reminded of them still brings back so many emotions I thought I had left in the past.

Do we ever really let go? By this point in our lives we have all learned that the fun little phrase, “forgive and forget” is basically a lie. To quote countless movies, books, and reality TV shows, “you can forgive but you never forget”. The entire notion is sort of silly to me. When you have been hurt by someone else you can usually find it in your heart to forgive the other person. I always try to remind myself that we are all human, extremely flawed and therefore make many mistakes. We ask and tend to even expect forgiveness from others, but what does the entire idea of forgiveness really mean?

When someone else causes you pain you go through a whirlwind of emotions that usually ends with a bottle of wine, copious amounts of snacks, and a bitch session with friends (at least that’s what I do…). After the initial sting has worn off we begin to assess the situation more rationally and are able to somewhat put aside our emotions in order to come to the conclusion of whether or not to give this person another chance. I have definitely been hurt before, as we all have, and in every instance (except one) I have been able to forgive the other person, mainly because I would want the second chance if I were them. However, in these past few months I have realized that the emotion dulls with time but it never really goes away. When you are reminded of an argument you had with your best friend where they threw things out there that were below the belt you rationalize and say, “well they were angry and probably didn’t mean it”. Part of the time this is true. Unfortunately, I have realized that I am able to move on with the other person after some serious drag out fights, but when I remember what was said I realize that I haven’t let it go.

This entire idea of “letting it go” seems unrealistic and also seems to simplify the complexity of our emotions and relationships. I think we have all established at this point that you don’t forget. Are we even capable of letting go? When the words still stab you months, even years later have you let it go? Or are you temporarily pulled back into that situation and the emotions in that time? You tend to wonder “do they really think that about me?”. Will we ever know the truth? Maybe. Maybe not. I guess we all have to decide what we can and cannot truthfully handle and realize that sometimes just because the fight is over and you’ve kissed and made up, you can’t always move forward.

musings by the engagement rings

“I often wonder what it’s like to be someone who can act impulsively. Is stress even in your vocabulary? Do you act first think later, or is it that you think faster than me? How many times have you regretted something you’ve done off the cuff? Do you regret anything at all?”

(Thought Catalog) http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/we-should-all-be-holly-golightly/

 

Thought Catalog is one of my favorite blogs out there. It is humorous and all too truthful and it always makes me think. This particular post drew my complete attention because I absolutely love Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the book and the movie, however the movie version is too Hollywood at the end… of course they will end up together, duh.) Holly Golightly is such a relatable character in so many ways. Like so many of us, she is confused and a little frightened. The future is pretty daunting in a lot of ways, probably because of it’s complete uncertainty. We can plan out our lives the best that we can but which one of us can say that our lives have followed our exact plans, we’ve all been sidetracked at one time or another. For some of us that sidetrack can be like getting on the freeway East and you need to go West and the next exit isn’t for 70 miles, we hope eventually we will be able to get back in the right direction but we really aren’t sure how long that will take and if your car won’t run out of gas before it gets there. 

As someone who lived impulsively in waves for years I can tell you, stress is the main reason for impulsivity. For many people immediately slapping your credit card down in store after store is what we do after a break-up or when we are experiencing some form of low self-esteem. We decide “ok, I will have one more shot…” when you know you have to be up at 5 am to catch a plane and it’s 1 am and you know one shot leads to more shots and inevitably you end up missing your flight out of sheer stupidity. 

The problem with these impulsive acts is that usually at the time we feel great, then a sinking feeling sets in and all of a sudden you realize what you’ve just done to yourself. Years later you still get angry with yourself for putting yourself thousands of dollars into debt spent on material items, nothing of real importance, except that second round trip ticket you purchased because you were a drunken idiot. 

I don’t think impulsive people necessarily “think faster” but they decide faster and instantaneously to feel something. We all know this feeling fades away, quickly. Instead of rejecting this chance you take it and run with it full force, in a dead sprint, until you stop and realize how negatively those flighty decisions affected the rest of your life. 

Holly Golightly, as much as I love her, isn’t some kind of “free spirit”, she is a scared little girl who has an emptiness she’s desperate to fill but she can’t, because she’s unwilling to stop running away from it. We run from things because we can’t face the truth of the situation, but most of all our part in it.

Her passion and enthusiasm for life makes me think we should all have a little Holly Golightly in us though, in the meantime think before you act, face the consequences of your decisions and live your life.

who do we think we are?

Every single day we pass judgments on other people. Every human being does it and we aren’t really able to control these thoughts when they come into our head. Competition is human nature, we all understand this fact. Competition can be healthy and motivating, but competition can also pull you down and crush you under it’s weight.

We judge because we are competitive, and we judge because we have an innate need to feel that what we think and know is right. How much does any one of us truly know? We all live completely separate lives with separate paths and obstacles. I can’t know how one person lives from one day to the next; I can see and listen but I will never actually know what someone is thinking or feeling. Who am I to say that their behavior is right or wrong? 

Yes, we have codes of behavior that we as a society have deemed “acceptable” and “unacceptable”. These codes of behavior are important and there is an unspoken understanding and usual compliance. We can say that someone “should” be doing things differently, and since we would like to think in the person’s best interest, we get upset or bothered by their behavior (usually because we care). There are very few people in this world, and it is a learned skill that needs to be practiced and maintained, who are able to truly put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Whether or not you agree with a person’s behavior doesn’t make them a bad person. We need to understand we all have challenges that we face daily.

I hope that we can come to understand that compassion and empathy are important traits that contribute to one’s happiness and overall sense of purpose. Supporting someone when they are having a difficult time is definitely stressful, but that doesn’t mean we should shy away from it. Instead we should feel important because a person has taken their pain and emotion and trusted us enough to reach out and open up. Friendship is essential in this life.

via Pintrest

new year, new focus

Hello 2013. I am ready to meet this year with a new attitude and a new re-awakened passion for living. The last two years of my life were a struggle, to say the least. I found myself in places I never thought I’d go, to the darkest depths within myself and my mind and I found myself making choices and compromises that I never thought I would. As each day goes by I am attempting to be a student of my life. In this way I want to be able to view my choices, analyze my feelings and emotions and be able to understand all sides of a situation with a more rational and wiser perspective. Within the last year I came to understand that I must be concerned with myself, my needs and I need to be my own person, figure out who I am and who it is I want to become.

I spent a great deal of time in the past two years completely immersed in someone else’s life. I put so many of my own needs aside in order to try to fix a situation I wasn’t equipped to fix. I realized I can’t cater to someone else’s needs and feelings without first focusing on my own. You can’t help someone else if you haven’t helped yourself, otherwise it becomes a downward spiral for everyone involved and that is exactly what happened. I programmed myself to cope in unhealthy ways in order to live the life I was living, in a situation where I felt completely helpless and trapped. I woke up one day realizing I had control. I was making a choice to stay in an environment and be around people who only brought negativity and destruction into my life and theirs. 

When I moved across the country, I know I had high expectations for the possibilities I was hoping to have. In so many ways the move helped me become more motivated and positive but I still felt myself slipping back into the negative thoughts. You try to leave certain aspects of yourself behind without realizing they are still a part of you and maybe you are just hiding them for a time until they reach out one day and grab you again. When this first began happening I was disappointed and felt that I would never be able to feel certain feelings again, or have the outlook that I wanted to have, but instead of worrying, lately I have forced myself to rationalize and to also put boundaries up to protect myself in situations I know will only bring strain.

As cliche as it sounds, the difficulties in life do bring extremely valuable lessons, even though looking back there are many things that I wish had turned out differently. Mistakes made and focus lost, but now I am choosing to do what is best for me and my happiness and peace of mind.

My New Year’s Eve was one of the best New Year’s I have ever had. I felt passion that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I couldn’t be more thankful. 2013 will be a better year because I am choosing to make it better, by becoming more positive, making better decisions and becoming more focused and motivated. We should all resolve to take control over our lives and drive ourselves into genuine happiness this year.