Well, to put it briefly, my life is at a crossroads. Some people know the whole story, but as things have been changing in my life, people who aren't right in the middle of the madness are watching and beginning to question. Whelp, here goes - the Reader's Digest version, if you will.
5 years ago on June 1st I lost the best man my life may ever see. My dad died unexpectedly from a brain aneurism. He was shoeing a horse when he collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital, flight for lifed to Denver, and pronounced dead by the next morning.
My dad with Dirt Cake Daisy, one of his favorite horses.
To put it mildly, it was a nightmare. To have someone who had been a rock in your life there one moment and gone the next isn't anything you can prepare for. The pain I still feel on a dailiy basis seems to be less and less, but then as the season leading up to his death, then the anniversary of it, along with Father's Day all bring it back as close as if it happened today. I will take full responsibility - I began to try and heal and allowed the man I was dating to fill the void I should have processed and grieved with losing my dad to fill that hole in my life. I was married 6 short months after Dad died.
Deep down I knew I was pushing something. That's something I have done for a lot of my life - striving, perservering, and following the plan I thought everyone wanted me to fulfill. That all began to create problems in my marriage... Anger issues began to arise, violent things happened, threats were made, and I decided at September of 2011 that I needed some perspective. I moved out of the house I shared with my husband, and with the different perspective I was able to see just how unhealthy we both were. I decided then and there that it was time to regain control of my life and stop living up to what other people wanted me to do.
That's not to say that the process has been easy. Divorce is never easy. Especially when people are involved. Hmmm.... Yup. Every divorce is difficult. We had issues, bad things happened, and there were points that it almost didn't happen. This song on Glee was a great new theme song for me right now.
The time has come to shake off the Devil from my back. A big part of allowing myself the time and space to properly heal from the pain of the past few years was quitting my job. I was stressed, working super hard, and not taking care of myself. The opportunity arose (basically my lease was up, my mom has a spare room in her barn - yes, I'm going to live in a barn, I don't have a mortgage, no debt, and a super-cool summer job to go to) and I decided to take it. Welcom my time out on life.
That's not to say that I am quitting life altogether. I'm just drawing boundaries on my time to give myself some space to breathe, think, and heal. My faith has been something that has suffered dearly through all of this emotional turmoil. I'm struggling with things like prayer. Why should we do it? If God's going to do what he's going to do whether I pray or not, why bother? And, did I not pray hard enough if my dad died and my marriage failed? Don't tell me to pray hard and God will answer - it almost makes me feel responsible for his death. Another question while I'm sharing - if God is all powerful, all knowing and all good, then why do bad things happen? Why aren't we just born in heaven?
Well, hopefully my blog will be a space to explore this, allow myself to heal, and begin the next adventure, whatever that may be. I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have this time and my timeout. My "plan" currently gets me to the middle of August. After that, the world is my oyster!
If you had this chance to do anything in the world that you could, what would it be? Let's all start dreaming a little bit more, and maybe we can all help each other reach that answer together - why are we here?
