From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I decided that I was going to be a bit better than the mother who raised me. In so many ways, I have been. My daughter is this really cool, wonderful, decent, and kind person that I admire. She's smart, funny, with the type of essence that makes others feel good when she's in the room. For the most part, I did it all on my own save for the first six years or so years with my ex in her life. We've been a team these past 15 years. A good one that wasn't filled with too much bullshit and strife. We argued over the little things and never anything big. Most days we've hugged and said "I love you" at least once or twice through a hug, text, or a yell up the stairs. The team is splitting up in seven days with Cat moving to Boston.
This move for her is long coming. She needs it and I need it. But, I'm trying to shift my mind into what the new normal is going to be like when I'm on my own. While I have great faith that she'll be fine as she goes off, I have to try and sort my own shit out so that I'll be fine as well.
I'm not fine. In fact, I'm sort of a mess of a person at times. Slogging through this life, I've been sort of dabbling at doing a few things without truly mastering all of them. If life were my canvas, there would be dabs and deliciously bright drips of colors all over it. Part of the canvas would have these beautiful bits that are slightly finished in the shape of a daughter. There would be career bits that are like a mosaic-tiled floor in the ruins of Pompeii with so many tiles missing or never there at all. My love life would have this erratic strokes of a child with a brush dipped in dried up and neglected art supplies.
I am aiming for being intentional in this portion of my life. This order of thoughts and actions that I've been slapping together like a cheap and silly contractor. Oh, shit. A new analogy is forming in my brain, but I'm not paid for them. I wish that I were. Sitting somewhere on a mountain writing about how we are the contractors of our own lives. We have to also be the architect, the plumber, electrician and everything.
The other day, I had this sad thought that, I am my only. It sort of sent me to thinking about it in a broader sense. I am my only in so many ways because I've always had to be my only. I'm my only: emergency contact number, form of support, best friend, enemy, and thief. Through this whole little journey into the next stage of my life, I have to continue to remember that I am my only thing standing in my way of having the life that I want.
Currently, I don't have all of the life I want. I don't have the friends, body, home, and finances that I long for. But, as my only, it is my job to make sure that what I want, I get. No one is going to show up on my door and show me how to get from point A to point B. It hasn't happened so far and it won't happen until I make it happen. Every once in a while, I'll have a friend tell me that something I'm doing is a good idea or that I should move forward with one of my dreams whether it's a book, product, podcast, or whatever. I'll be all excited and think to myself that I can do it and then just as quickly, I stop. This is the bullshit that has to end. This stopping myself. It's easy to sit here and write this all out to an audience of me and three, but the only way out of the life that I've built for myself is to build myself another to move into and towards. Back to my contractor analogy shit. I've got to build the life that I want to move into before I move out of the one I have. But, I before I move on, I have to fix the life that I have and sell it, turn a profit, and then move on to the next one. Instead of living in this rundown fixer upper that could be great with a little bit of effort.
So, to commit to this new life, I'm making certain changes. It's not a New Year's resolution sort of shit, but me living with intention to build a better life for myself without any excuse.
Off to do some work to make money to have this life.
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