A Fabulous Mess

   After an adventure this afternoon involving the Islamic Center, keys locked in a running car, and someone’s ex-husband, I found myself at Logan’s for happy hour.     When my friends from class and I get together, we commonly talk about how much we hate our lives, how school is insane, how we use alcohol to get through it all, and how the weeks are winding down.

     Once that gets old, we usually move on to relationships and men, a common topic with most females, especially those in their twenties who are single.

     In my cultural diversity class today, I gave a fifteen minute presentation about the ex. The point of it was to interview someone different from me, and there ain’t no one more different from me than a strictly Catholic, ultraconservative, gun loving Republican.

     Thinking about that time in my life, about how it felt when he left for boot camp and how we were going to get married before he had to go to war and how much I was willing to give to him… it made me sad. Not because I miss him, it has nothing to do with that. I miss me. I miss the me I was then, the me that believed in someone else whole heartedly, the me that could spend an entire day with someone, not say anything, and feel completely at home. The me that was able to say ‘I love you’ and mean it, and who believed with my entire soul that it was real.

     When it was my turn to swap stories at happy hour, I picked up my third beer and spilled it. Not the beer, I spilled my guts. The response and advice I got was: You think that it’s supposed to be butterflies, you think you’re going to fall into it and it will be fun and it will be easy and you’ll just know. That’s bullshit. You don’t ever just know, you have to take a risk, open yourself up to someone, and jump in head first if you really want to know. You seem to think that relationships aren’t worth it because they never work out, and that’s not true. You need to think about what happens when the butterflies go away. When it does become real and when it does become hard. And you need to stop being scared.

     Considering this came from the woman who once kicked the windshield of her car in and tried to blame it on a bird, I was a little shocked. She pegged me down perfectly, and actually made a lot of sense.

     So, what’s a girl to do when every single aspect of her life is completely and totally up in the air? When she’s not sure how she’s going to pay the stack of bills piling up on her desk, if she’s going to pass her last class in nursing school, where she’s going to work if she does, and if she will ever get to plan the wedding she’s been thinking about since she was six?

     For me, for now, I’m trying to make my brain stop working, but it’s been going at three times the normal speed for about twenty six years now. I can’t stop thinking about how my life would be if my decisions years ago had been more solid, if I hadn’t been the type of person who was waiting for everything to fall into her lap.

     Nothing falls into your lap, usually a lot of thought and time goes into getting what you ultimately want, whether it’s a job, a degree, training for a marathon, or writing a novel. And even on those rare occassions when it does magically appear, you have to make the decision whether you want it there or not. You can let it sit until it leaves on it’s own, you can push it away, or you can grab it, tight, with both hands, hoping that you made the right decision.

     I usually let things sit until they go away, but lately I’ve been shooing a lot of things off of my lap.

     I need to stop shooing.

Trackback URL