Contentment

I am where I am right now due to all of the choices and decisions made in my past and where I will go will for the most part depend on all of the planning I have completed for the future.

While I do not take my current situation for granted, I am not as content as I think I could be. The true definition for me of unhappiness is thinking there is a place better than the one you're in. I never planned to have my life the way it is now and perhaps that's why it is the way it is now.

I work hard. I am a nice person. I don't take huge risks. I have grown to believe in myself. I am independent. I don't know when I will be able to relax and be content with my life. It just is. And I accept it. It's not better than my father's or my grandfather's life. In many ways, it's actually worse. I feel like they worked in vain trying to make my life better, easier, more "whatever". And I have squandered it by not planning and not knowing. In a way, not caring.

I've made poor decisions by not deciding.

Being paralyzed by fear and rejection, embarrassment and ridicule. From people I don't even like or care about.

I thought my life would be so different than it is now. Ask me how and I don't know the details. I just feel like I am spinning my wheels.

So close I can taste it...

This past year has changed me. I can honestly say I've gotten tougher, though it's not like a was a light-weight to begin with. I feel like a rock that's been made into granite.

Last year this time, I had no idea what was in store for me in 2009. I thought I would get closer to my goals and closer to who I thought I wanted to be. It could not have taken me further away from where I thought I was going. In a way, it provided me with new goals and shook me to my core. 2009 told me I wasn't as strong as I thought I was. It told me not to believe everything I see and all that people tell me. It took away another innocence veil and fed my inner skeptic even more.

Family issues coupled with the loss of my job flung me out into the outer reaches of space. I wasn't who I thought I was, since the two main dictators of identity were throwing me up after a night of hard drinking. I'm not one to dwell or live in the past, but I definitely had to make it through both of those before I could move on. I'm still not past the family issue, but I am working on it.

Friends I thought would be there for me tossed me out as well. Roads they were forced to take became the "best routes" and the "way to go". My path became overgrown and inconsequential.

For stretches of time, there was no one to depend on. No office mates to lunch with, no family to rely on, no friends to download to. All I had was myself.

I remember quite vividly the exact moment in my pre-teen life that I realized that we all die alone. No matter when or where or with whom, we must all go on to where ever it is alone. That first panic attack was a doozy. I had always been surrounded by family, friends, people, animals. To envision walking the lonely path to the other side was unbearable. I was young and naive. Now I feel old and jaded. But resilient. No one would walk through life with me - why would they want to walk to my death with me?

So tonight when the clock hits midnight, instead of reveling in the memories and planning future goals, I won't be expecting anything of 2010. I have a feeling I won't be alone.

Like a band-aid...

I woke up this morning and didn't want to go through it anymore. I didn't want to search for credit cards and past bills and remember to log-in and pay the minimum amount. I didn't want to log my progress in a notebook or put reminders for bills due on my calendar online. I wanted it done. I wanted them gone. In the past two months, I've received more "shut down your account or risk having an inflated apr" notices. Some, from my longest held credit cards. I felt like saying, "I thought you were my friends."

You arrived in the mail when I was at college and didn't get any other snail mail. You had fancy forms to fill out that made me feel like an adult. You lured me in and now, on the cusp of my seeming adulthood, you want to banish me from your record. Or sear me with a high apr. I'm not your piece of meat to play with. I understand your ways. I realize by me paying minimums and not really spending anymore, I'm not adding to your bottom line. I'm not making any one of your fat cat's parachutes a little more golden.

So I took them all and like a band-aid, ripped them all off. "Paid in full" is what will come to my little mailbox now. I have switched the roles. I have the leverage now. I will not use you anymore for my silly happiness. I will restrict myself to the bare essentials and enjoy myself by doing so. Your crutch is useless to me now. I don't even know where all of my cards are right now. True, this is not incredibly responsible, but in a way, it is. Instead of freezing them in a block of ice, I've taken to "losing them" around my house (really hiding them) so I cannot access them. When I do run into them, it's usually not during an online spending spree urge or trip to the mall.

Just in time for credit companies to make millions on others who overspent for the holidays, I will be rich with the free time and worry-free mentality that paying them all off has granted me.

There is no better late Christmas present.

Mental Blocks

I've been working on mental blocks, recently. Those pesky annoyances that I only have with myself. Invisible to others, they keep me from completing a task or taking a risk. No one can see them - why should I care?

How I look, how I act; everything I can nitpick, I do. My never-ending dialogue tells me I can't do something before anyone else informs me. Tells me I'm not good enough before I can even try anything. I have learned to turn down the voice inside of me and will work on completely quieting it in the future.

I've been reading See Jane Lead and ran into this gem of a story. I've given up on being judged by pigs.

No one can tell me who I am. Only I know what I have been and what I would like to become.
Only the future holds the truth about what I can achieve.

Putting my mind, heart and soul into anything will make it happen. I must believe to achieve. Failure is not an option.

Not having to answer to anyone is freeing. Liberating. Empowering.

I feel like I've just broken a mold I've been trapped in for too long.

Adventures in Frugal Cooking

I have a lot of mac and cheese in my possession. Don't ask why. It's a story too long to tell.

In trying to use this mac and cheese up, I started boiling some water and dropped the pasta in. I took out the milk, then went searching for my butter tub. I searched high and low and then realized I must have used the last of it during my last big cooking day [too long ago to remember - another thing I thought I'd do more of in my unemployment, become a domestic diva].

So I figured if I mixed this aging organic [bought around 9 months ago when I still had a job] salsa in, I wouldn't miss the butter. I thought of it like how some people put chopped tomatoes or even ketchup on their mac and cheese. I didn't just stop there, though. I went further, adding cumin, chili powder, black pepper and crushed red pepper flakes. Perhaps a few too many of those. It was delightful sitting down with my milky, hold the butter, add the spice and salsa mac and cheese. It was delicious. Until a half hour later, when all of the spice hit my stomach. Now I can't even fathom looking at the rest of the batch left in the pot.

That will teach me to keep my spices in check and always check for butter before I drop any pasta...

Take your passion and make it happen

Another Monday morning. Everyone off and running at their jobs and me here at home.

I woke up early this morning, made coffee and savored it. I ran out of sugar this weekend so I used Hershey Kisses to sweeten my home brew. They're not sugar, but they'll do.

When I woke up at 6 am, I started watching TV. Flashdance was on. I had never seen this movie before, but as a child of the '80s I've always enjoyed the soundtrack, especially "What a Feeling" ... and now that I've seen the movie, I love the song even more.

So while everyone else is working, I'll be dancing around, imagining myself at 18 again, with my whole life ahead of me and my unemployment far, far away.

Life Gets In The Way

I have been laying low recently, hence the no blogging. I actually forgot I had a blog. Strange, I know.

I've been dealing with family issues and a family friend's death. I have experience with much family death, but each loved one's death I experience takes me back to the previous ones. And then I am mourning for them all. All over again. It's an exhausting process and grief is just something you have to go through to get through. This is the time that I yearn for my childhood - the time before any of my relatives passed away.

Death is so definite. One day you're talking and planning and yearning and the next you're not. I'm not goth or obsessed with death. It's been a part of my life for a while now and I am still searching for its meaning. I have listened to "On Death and Dying" twice in my car a few years ago. I'm thinking about putting it back on in heavy rotation.

Losing my job has been a grieving process. Now with these situations lumped on top, it's difficult to take on both every single day. Meetings at work where people gently tiptoe around the fact that I won't be there in a month's time make me feel more dead each day.

In Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grieving, I believe I'm at depression when it comes to my job. I'm hoping acceptance will come in the next five weeks, but we shall see. I've been here for a while and now I'm depressed on a personal level.

Definition

So how will I know when I have reached adulthood? My definition of adulthood is when I have: 

- no debt

- monetary responsibility

- a professional career

- separation in beliefs and needs from my parents

- and someone to share the rest of my life with

Simple enough. I threw that last one in just because everyone I know is either married or getting married and I am allowed to have some schoolgirl dreams invade my plan for adulthood.

There are plenty of step stones toward these goals that I must map out and accomplish before achieving it all.  My hope is that this blog keeps me accountable and provides me with external support along the way.