A Great, Wide, Hope

I am an absolute sucker for springtime. I love the freshness of the earth reviving itself, the winter slowly melting under a medley of sudden storms and sunny skies. I become revitalized in spring, emerging from my shrouded winter self into New Me.

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New Me doesn’t always stick around, but she’s fun and far more hopeful than Normal Me.

Every spring, I hit a point – usually late March, early April – where I feel inspired to shake up my routine. To move more, write more, live more. To shake the shackles of winter and be New Me.
This year isn’t any different except in one key way. This year, I hope to keep it up. Everything I start this spring, I’m going to continue into the dark of winter. I’m going to move more, I’m going to write more, I’m going to not allow the doldrums to nest in my brain again once the oppressive heat of summer bears down.

I’m writing it all out here in the hopes this helps provide some sort of accountability. I’m going to keep working out, and not quit when it’s inconvenient. I’m going to keep writing, even if it isn’t particularly good, even if no one reads it. I’m going to keep reading more (once I averaged 100 or so books a year, last year I think I only read 40), and avoid social media in the process.

Most importantly, though, I’m going to keep this mind shift I’ve been working on. To look for the positive, instead of dwelling on the negative. To give myself and others more grace. To forgive more easily, rather than holding grudges. To live with hope, rather than despair.

I expect it to be hard, I expect to backslide from time to time. But the horizon is hope, and that’s where I’ll train my eyes to rest.

What Now?

I’ve been giving some thought to whether I want to keep posting, and if I do keep posting, then what do I post?

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While I enjoy void journaling (that’s what I consider what I’ve created on here so far – journaling into the internet void, laying bare dark parts of myself for whomever stumbles across), I want to create more than just self-reflective whinging. Not that self-reflective whinging isn’t important and doesn’t have it’s time and place – I just long to create again.

My creative skills are rusty. As a young adult, a teenager, hell even a child, I wrote constantly. Short stories, (mediocre to bad) poetry, micro fiction, et al. I wrote with regularity, and to fill a deep need to create with words. Now, I struggle to write anything. It’s hard, fighting to find core parts of yourself after years of neglect.

I have begun to push myself again, though. To force myself to write out ideas and pieces of stories, to try to find my way back to that spark that once kept me up late at night, imagining worlds and people to life. I’m going to start sharing some of those on here, to gather the scraps and pieces together and hopefully weave something worthwhile out of them.

It’s easy to forget yourself as you get older. Those little habits, little sparks that were so defining to us in our youth can easily be dampened by responsibilities and the realities of life. For so long, my end goal was to find a way to be a stable provider, to give my husband and son a comfortable life. This isn’t to say exotic vacations or designer goods; merely a comfortable home and the safety of knowing all bills are paid, all needs are met.

I achieved that (not alone, my husband and I are a true partnership, something I am very proud of), and thought with that achievement would come a sense of completion and contentment. Instead, I feel unmoored, as though in all my striving something precious was lost.

Now is my chance to try to recover that which was lost. To find the kernel of self I sacrificed along the path to what I imagined adulthood to be. I hope to grow back my passion for writing, to revive it’s browned stump into something bearing foliage once again.

The Eve of the Eclipse

The eve of the eclipse, a random Sunday, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the need to glance back a nearly decade old blog I started when I was at (one of) my lowest points.

Crazy how fast time flies, how it slips away when you aren’t looking. How it glides past, even when your eyes are firmly on it, tracking each moment with razor precision.

I am not the same person I was when I wrote those posts all those years ago. And I am exactly that person still.

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Return of the Sad Sack

Hello, people who are probably not there or reading this. Here I am! The Sad Sack! Back in the flesh!

It has been months since I’ve updated this blog. Months that have had their fair share of happiness and sadness. I’d like to type out that I am now so successful, so busy leading a full life that I haven’t written because LIFE. That isn’t the case.

However, it is also NOT not the case. Bear with me, I’m rusty on writing and I doubt that I will string together beautiful, haunting, sentences but hell – I’ll string some, anyway.

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New Year, New Me (LOL, Jk.)

Oh, New Year’s Eve. What a night. I’m one of those suckers for NYE. The anticipation of a shiny, untarnished year, filled with prospective hopes and dreams and warmer weather, is one of my favorite feelings. That being said, it is typically a let-down, if not a full on, all out mess. What starts as a bubbly excitement can easily sour, after a few IPAs, into regret and disenchantment with the year previously lead.

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In Which I See How Weird the Internet Really Is

I found my uncle on FaceBook.

Okay, well, technically he isn’t my uncle anymore. My (horrible, terrible, awful human being) aunt divorced him shortly after my cousin’s death way back in 2001. And I have had no contact with my uncle, my H*******masa (“masa” means “my mother’s sister’s husband”) since then.

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I Acknowledge an Incredibly Stupid Bad Habit.

So, I have never actually told anyone, except my fiancé (who has, sadly, witnessed it first hand), about this particularly terrible habit of mine. Wait, that isn’t true – I’ve laughed it off to my mom and sister before when confronted about it, claiming it to be long in the past.

I have many bad habits. I drink too much, I’m lazy, and self-indulgent. I’m quick to anger, yet also swallow back my true feelings to avoid conflict.

But this is my worst bad habit.

Continue reading I Acknowledge an Incredibly Stupid Bad Habit.