not drowning, but waving

Hello to you, my dear friends and family, stalkers and creepers, exes and lost loves and regular readers and random passersby. A lot has happened since we last spoke, so much in fact that I hardly know where to begin. But I’ve been feeling that itchy urge to write here again, and here I sit in the fading light of day, with my love and my practice daughters downstairs building Lego cities, my dog and my cats snoozing on the furniture, music in the background, a keyboard and a white page in front of me. And it’s so different from the last time I wrote.

Spring was lousy. It was miserable and awful and I don’t even really want to talk about it, but I’ll need to talk about it a little bit so you know how it laid the foundation for what was to come. I used to be really into establishing superlatives – my worst birthday, my best year, my worst season, my best month, and so on. I can’t do it anymore. Spring sucked, but I don’t really know if it sucked more or less than the previous spring. Nobody died this spring, so in that sense it was better. But on the other hand, this was the spring when I realized I was drowning. It was not a sudden realization; in fact, it came up so gradually that by the time I could give it a name, it was nearly too late. I was out so far that no one could see me. My feet couldn’t find the ground, my legs were too tired to keep kicking, my arms were leaden weights, my lungs and ears and eyes were filling with water and it was rapidly closing over my head. Maybe no one knew. Maybe everyone knew. It doesn’t really matter now.

So among a million other sucky things, I came down with mono, which is stupid in the one sense because hello, I’m thirty years old and that ought to be too damn old for mono. But it isn’t. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was absolutely debilitating for me. I spent nearly a month at home, isolated and lonely and miserable and more exhausted and sick than I’ve ever been in my life. I had a lot of time to think. And as I came around the corner and began to recover, I slowly realized that I was drowning. Mono wasn’t the cause – it was a symptom.

And once I finally got it together enough to realize I was drowning, the answer was simple. Find solid ground.

So I did.

It would make a far more dramatic, better story if I told you how hard it was to find solid ground, but seriously, it wasn’t that hard. The answers were right in front of me the entire time, and once I could see them, it was fairly easy to choose them. And though those choices happened to also be beneficial for others, it’s important to know that I made them for myself.

I talked to the people who matter and support me. I quietly stepped out of the way of the people who didn’t. I found a new job and a new house in a new city, and all the other pieces began to fall into place.

I am calm and centered these days. I am effective and productive at work. I am happier than I’ve been in a long time. And I can’t wait to tell you the rest of the story.

I’m still writing it, and I hope you’ll be here to read it with me.

This is me, waving.