Looking Forward while Remembering

It is technically the first anniversary of my un-wedding (though I view it as the second given that I celebrated it last year).

Last year I was still numb. I had just come out of 6 months of intense individual and group counseling. I was getting ready to fly out to a foreign city and put into action what I had been learning about myself and about the healing journey we each individually set out on when we step from being a victim to being a survivor.  I have learned many lessons some simple and possibly trite and other very complicated and maybe poorly explained in this context but I will attempt to do so.

1.  Eat whatever the hell you want - if at the end of a week of double therapy and you feel like shit already, shoving a Whopper meal in your mouth in attempt to plug the gaping raw emotional hole is not bad.  I consumed ice cream despite the pain and the heart burn, I ate because despite the poor nutritional composition of the above,  eating is necessary for survival - if it can go in and stay in and possibly make you feel better - that is your focus.  This is when I abandoned veganism - cooking for myself was form of self care I wasn't prepared to engage in.

2. Put one foot in front of the other, repeat, repeat and repeat again.  While this can be your marathon mantra, it's also the mantra of anyone trying to function, living isn't the goal, functioning is.  The daily get up, get dressed, get on the bus, go to work, smile (remember to fake it until you make it*), repeat, repeat repeat.  Then one day you might laugh, you might not feel completely raw and hollow - like someone has used one of your grandmother's souvenir spoons to hollow out all your internal contents.

3. Fake it until you make it* - my psych's words of wisdom which I live by

4.  Your heart is to be trusted - especially if you are a woman.  Our hearts are crazy - they love with intensity foreign to even ourselves, we feel deeply - pain, joy, violations etc, we hold our feelings, we have a 7th sense - it's the female intuition - we often refer to it as the mom sense - the one that knows when something is wrong, but it doesn't start when we have children - it is born into us - but we often ignore it.  We stop listening to that gut feeling that says no, this is wrong, you are better than this, you are loved - we ignore any or all of those statements.  I did and lo and behold I ended up engaged to a man I should never have even entered into a romantic relationship with.

5. There are some men who will insist they are ready for change - they were just waiting for you or they had just started making changes when you came along.  This is not good.  This is CEF.  I will tell you that he hadn't made the changes before and he wasn't going to make them after.  He wanted someone to make him feel better for being him - for being the apathetic, broken, alienating person he was.  I wanted him to be someone else.

6.  What you see is what you get with men,  if you are okay with what you see then great be friends.  If you love/want what you see (the whole person - insides are more important but whatever you know what I am getting at) then great he's good, he's the kind you spend late nights with - those don't necessarily work but whatever that's for another time and place.

7. Friends - Ms. J and I were friends but we weren't BFF's by any means - she was however my life line.  She didn't run at the sight of my pain.  Maybe Jennifer Knapp put it best this week on Twitter - and I will best summarize those who speak most eloquently of grace have received it in a profound way.  I have learned grace and mercy at the hands of Ms. J - they don't hand out life prizes for this on this Earth, but I know she's got a big one coming her way.

8.  Ms. J was only successful because I let her be.  Sounds a little narcissistic but it's true I could have gone on the rest of my life not talking but I got to the point where I just did it - sure it may have sounded formulaic to those around me at times - but it had to be a matter of fact act - I had so little energy and my movement forward was where that was going to be channeled.

9.  You never know where life is going to take you - let it fill you as you live - NYC, half and full marathon, school, future - life has changed and regardless of the ups and downs it is freaking beautiful.

10. Did I mention you put one foot in front of the other?    Tonight I am going to put one stiletto'd foot in front of the other and in the process celebrate the people who through their actions and prayers have got me here.