leaving it behind

Today I realized that I have crossed a threshold of some kind.

The horrible, soul-sucking guilt; the incredibly painful feeling-with (which I don’t know if that’s empathy or just codependence…); the feeling that I should not fully enjoy my life because someone I love can’t enjoy theirs… I’m ready to leave that behind.

Yes, I still feel bad about many things. Yes, I still care and want T to be okay. Yes, I have to remind myself that it’s okay to want to do all these things that I want to do, to invite these people into my life that I want to invite… but I’m feeling very ready to leave the really deep icky stuff behind. Time is a funny thing. It’s been almost three months — it doesn’t feel like that, although then again, it does. Time enough for going through those really sticky edgy difficult feelings; now it’s time to start looking forward in earnest. Three months is a long time. Three months is a short time. At any rate, it’s been enough time for me to move past some of the more difficult feelings and to start to want to welcome other feelings.

The last couple years have been hard, hard, hard. Yes, we were able to buy a house. But other than that, frankly, it pretty much sucked. I tried to put on a — if not happy, then at least a doing-the-best-I-can face, but was actually drowning in despair and hopelessness and really just trying to stay in the present moment — looking into the future was too scary and really not something I wanted to contemplate. I was trying to make things okay, to make this daily life worth living, but it was very difficult. II’m proud of how I handled things and how well we did, considering. But it was really not very fun most of the time. A lot of very sad, difficult things happened. And they happened over and over and over again.

And now things are different. Now, regardless of what is happening with someone else (which I don’t know much about, and don’t need to), I can do things. I can go out to events, three nights a week if I want to. I can clean all the carpets myself on a whim. I can choose a paint color and wham, bam, paint two rooms just because I want to. I can sleep at night in a dark room, perfectly quiet, without interruptions. I can reconnect with old friends and pick up relationships that I’ve missed. I can go to a volunteer training session to be a Door Captain and not worry about how much time it might take up.

(the Door Captain is definitely where it’s at: you get to have contact with patrons and the General Manager of the venue! Yes! Sign me up!)

Now the future looks pretty dang good, I have to say. A few more weeks, maybe a couple months, of detail-work to get things sorted. I’m not super-thrilled about some of what I have to do, but it will be okay. And I have enough good things blossoming in my life that the stuff that I’m not thrilled about, feels manageable. It’s feeling like the scales of Good-Stuff vs. Bad-Stuff are starting to tip in Good-Stuff’s favor. And that’s very, very welcome in my life.

Amendment: After I wrote the above, I checked Free Will Astrology. This is my message for the week:

Shedding is healthy — not just for cats and dogs and other animals but also for us humans. Did you know that you shed thousands of particles of dead skin every hour? And just as our bodies need to shed, so do our psyches. I bring this up, Virgo, because you are in an unusually favorable phase to do a whole lot of psychic shedding. What should you shed exactly? How about some of these: old ideas that don’t serve you any more, habits that undermine your ability to pursue your dreams, compulsions that are at odds with your noble intentions, resentment against people who did you wrong a long, long time ago, and anything else you carry with you that keeps you from being fully alive and radiant. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the price of freedom and aliveness is eternal shedding.