04/17/2024
Normally I would do a post like this in my private group but someone, somewhere needs to "hear/read" this, so here goes:
In therapy today my therapist was going over how she is trying to nail down with her supervisor EXACTLY what it is I am there for. Good luck, is all I have to say to her on that.
My therapist told me that when talking to her supervisor she explained that I am "different", she has never met anyone like me. I have no doubt. She gets the unfiltered version of me. I told her after the first session that the thing I had talked about that she was upset (for me) about barely blips my radar of things that have been done to me and/or have happened to me that p**s me off, and if she is going to get triggered every time, then perhaps it might not be a good fit. She has learned to just roll with it and to not be shocked by the things I tell her, at least not in a big reaction kind of way.
Today she got me to open up about my late husband and my businesses. Believe it or not, I usually gloss over the totality of everything that happened. I had to keep stopping to clarify because she was like, "WHAT?!" every couple of minutes. My coping mechanism is literally to say, "This is just my life". I absolutely know that my life has been the sh*t they make movies about. I know that at times what I have lived through is down right absurd/crazy/ridiculous. This is just my life. I can say that, exactly like that, because the advice that I give in my book is the blueprint for how I have "fixed" myself over the years. I have an exercise that I developed that allows me to remove myself emotionally (most days) from my trauma because THIS IS JUST MY LIFE. If I dwell in the ugly things I am guaranteed to miss the beautiful things...and I did for many years. No more.
Today she wanted clarification on my timeline. She wanted to know precisely how long from leaving my husband was it for me to start being happy and living a new life. How long was it? Precisely the amount of time it took for me to tell him I was done, grab my pillow, and walk out the door to the RV. I would say roughly 3 minutes. She was floored. We ALL talk about "just drop your baggage, stop carrying it around with you". I actually did it. That was what she and her supervisor were having a hard time with because no one actually does that.
I made a choice in that moment. If I walked out that door and dragged all of my manic depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and more with me then leaving would not solve the problem. I would just be digging a deeper hole for me to stand in. The only way that leaving would be beneficial to me was if I left all of that crap behind. So I did. I symbolically left it in my old house and walked out. That is the WHY behind my lack of emotional attachment to the place I called home for 14 years and why I decided it was better to just leave the state and start a new life rather than stay and fight for the place that literally housed the worst parts of my life. Embedded in the walls and tile of that place are some of the best times of my life, but also all of the emotional baggage that tried its best to kill me. I left. I win.
So this is just my life. My life is not what I would have chosen for myself, had I been able to order it on Amazon, but that isn't how life works. We don't get to order a pre-made, custom life built on our every hope and dream. It just doesn't work that way. But, we do get to choose day by day, hour by hour, the pieces of our life that eventually make up the entirety of it. I stopped choosing the belief that if I just tried harder to make everyone around me happy, that they would stop doing the extremely toxic and harmful things they were doing. I started choosing ME.
I walked out that door and left everything about it behind. I started doing virtually everything differently. Different bed to sleep in. Different person to fall asleep with. Different place to live. Different food. Different clothes. Different music. Different inner circle. Different vacations. I even gutted my business, rebranded and renamed. In 180 seconds, in the aftermath of hurricane Irma, my life boiled down to 2 choices: Stay and eventually commit su***de or leave and do everything differently. I chose DIFFERENT. Ironically, I was able to do that because the man that was actively trying to destroy me, once upon a time loved me enough to spend a decade convincing me that I deserved nothing but the best of everything in life.
I am not special. Not in this way, anyways. If I could do it, so can you. All of the excuses you have for staying in sh*tty relationships and situations, are just that: EXCUSES. Whatever you lose in terms of money pales in comparison to what you lose in terms of time, energy, and joy. In 180 seconds, in 2017, I walked away from an entire life that I built with no safety net. I did it again in 2020. I regret nothing.
Here I am today. I survived. I not only survived, I have consciously chosen to thrive. Has it always been easy? No. Despite what pithy social media memes tell you, life is not meant to be "easy". We don't grow and flourish in stagnation. Maybe my therapist is right, that I need to publish my books because people need to hear my whole story and that the blueprint to someone else's liberation is hidden in the pages I keep squirreled away on my laptop. Right now, I am busy. Publishing will have to wait. But today someone, somewhere needed to "hear" that this may not be the life I would have chosen for myself but I choose to make it amazing. All the sh*t from my past is nothing more than life lessons designed to get me to right here. If I change one thing from the past I lose out on everything that I have now; peace, happiness, clarity, mutual & respectful love. At the end of the day, I would absolutely order those things for myself on Amazon, so I guess I did choose this life...the whole damned thing, exactly as it has been.
If you want a new life, then choose to do one thing differently and do it today. You don't need to burn it all down like I did. You just need to choose something different and act on it.
