How to Figure it all out...

How to figure it all out...

Subtitle: I know this is supposed to be a comedy post but this year has been interesting...

I just needed to get this out. 

Dearest Readers, 

So many of you are new and fast friends and I appreciate each of you coming with me on this journey.  I want to take a little time this afternoon to tell you some more about me. Do not judge, it's life, and I am not looking for sympathy or trying to bash others. I just feel that people need to know. 

My dad wanted a boy and I knew that from the moment I could understand. My mom on the other hand was the most amazing person ever, making sure that despite the way my dad made me feel my entire life, worthless, that I never did with her. He eventually got bored with parenting and left, leaving me, my mom and my brother destitute. 

I'm gonna stop the life story there because I don't want to write it. It was a Lifetime movie, literally, maybe that's why I hate them, and if you ever really want to know I will tell you, but that's all I want to say now. But I had my mom, my amazing amazing mom and my brother and that was all I needed. 

I met Jack in college and the people I met there changed my life. College changed my life. Randolph-Macon changed my life. It wasn't the fun college experience though, I had to work many more hours than my peers and I tried to have the experience and I did, but I missed some things. I missed some things but I still met amazing people and I got Jack. That was the best thing, I got Jack. 

So we got married. I never lived on my own, never did that single thing, but that's ok. I don't regret it. I got what many people long for, look for and never find. We had kids very soon after we got married and that was good too, except for the post partum depression. I have had depression my entire life and have been able to control it with exercise, etc. but this I just couldn't bear. I lost myself in sadness and lost everything, everything I had worked so hard for. See, I don't want to be that person that announces "Oh boo hoo, my life was so hard, look at me overcoming it" I don't, I just want to explain, probably more for self-cathartic reasons than anything. Many of you know the the story from this point, the REAL reason I drove to Chicago, the real reason I even give two shits that the man exists. Others can fight and feud like children over who he gives attention to but my reality is that I just want him to understand that for some strange fucked up reason THAT brought me from the brink and I owe him forever. 

2012 was my year. Sure, it all started in late 2010, but in 2012 I got myself back, the person I had worked so hard on in school and had lost in the blink of an eye. It was such an amazing and fantastic year that I cried most of New Year's Eve for fear that it was ending, fear of what 2013 would bring, as my fever spiked again to 104 degrees. And I'm not gonna lie, 2013 has SUCKED so far: We had some good news fall through, some issues at work that no one can fix, problems in our community (not with us, but it is tearing my community apart) and other random instances of back luck, so much so that I felt myself slipping away, back to that place of despair I had fled. 

But this week it hit me. Life's not easy, I mean I knew that, but it's really not. It's hard as hell, shit's gonna fall into your lap, people are going to be nasty to you just to make themselves feel better, things that seem so perfect can fall apart in an instant. 2012 might have been the year that I got Bri back, that wild, hardworking go getter that wants to save the world but 2013 is about what I DO with her. It's one thing to reclaim yourself, but it is quite another to set them out into the world. Sure, January has kinda sucked, with challenges I could have never expected, but what's going to prove my mettle is whether or not I can rise to the challenge. 

I can. I've got this. Life, experience, dreaming, being a part of the world and not a complacent observer has prepared me. 

I've got this. 

And if you need me my friend, I've got you. 

Bring it on 2013. In the past I might have crumbled, but 2012 prepared me for you. It prepared me for what is REALLY important in life. 

On that note, I need to get back to that. You know, life and all. 

Thanks for listening.