Dropping the Ball.

It's that time of year again, where everyone sits down with their pad of paper and writes out the same ole' New Year's Resolutions that they write down every year.

"This year, I will lose the weight."

"This year, I will organize the garage."

"This year, I will spend more time with my family."

Every year I do this, and every year I inevitably fail. I set up these lofty, broad resolutions that really have no chance of being taken seriously because they aren't realistic.

Okay, so I want to lose some weight. I have (hopefully) a wedding to plan this year and I refuse to look at wedding dresses with a double chin and these 30 extra pounds around my middle that have magically appeared since I've been in a relationship. What are some actual REAL steps I can take to get there?

I've decided that instead of making broad resolutions that have tons of room for failure, I am going to make realistic monthly goals that I have a better chance at succeeding at. I have a history of dropping the ball each and every year when it comes to those darned resolutions and this year, I refuse to allow my goals to go unfulfilled - which is why I am setting them up for success.

My first and foremost way to set up success for myself is to get rid of distractions....of which I have many. I need to make myself a priority and then stick by that. Maybe if I invest more into myself, then others around me will be inspired to do the same. I do so much for so many people that at the end of the day, not much is left for myself. I feel guilty if I steal a few minutes away at the end of the day for an extra long bath. I never complain when after working hard and diligently and then stealing off to have a quiet lunch alone at work, my boss barges in to chat 15 minutes of my alone time away. I give in to my children's each and every demand upon my attentions.

This needs to be amended. 

I think I will be pleasantly amazed at how better I will function and how easier keeping to my schedule will be once I get rid of the distractions and the needless noise. That needless noise includes in part, my anxieties. They take up so much of my day. I worry about this, I worry about that, I worry about worrying about this and that. If I had nothing to worry about, I'd borrow something. It's not only time consuming, but it's exhausting and all that anxiety keeps me from getting other things done properly and with good form. I need to remember that to have success, I must create it.

I spoke in an earlier post about creating my sacred spot for writing. It's a spot that will be dedicated only to the writing process and nothing else. It will be mine, and mine alone. My desire to write is right up at the top of my resolution/goal list for the new year. I will create opportunities for me to sit down and allow myself the peace, quiet and time to write. The goal for this is simple - spend the first week that I am back home creating this spot. In the meantime, find other places to sit down and pour some thoughts out. The writing process cannot stop just because things are not yet perfect. The sacred spot shall be created, but it may take the entire month to do it (monetary means after Christmas need some sorting). I will still sit down every single day and write - whether it be an hour or half an hour. I must begin conditioning myself, my body, my mind and my emotional state to writing again.

Writing is not easy. Pouring my feelings and thoughts into a public forum are not easy. I am afraid, I am nervous and I am not sure how I will receive myself. I can only promise myself that above all, I will try very hard to be kind. I will not re-read and analyze my blog postings...I will let things flow and then hit "publish" and be done with it.

Okay - so one of my goals for the new year is to figure out a situation with my job that will work for everyone. I currently work 8 hours a day with a 2 hour a day commute. That is 10 hours a day - 50 hours a week that I am away from my home. I make a decent amount of money for what I do, and I manage my money moderately well and my family lives a happy and contented life with all of the things that we need and a lot of the things that we want. We could go without a lot of things and still be happy.

I enjoy my job, but also have a lot of issues with it.

A) It's not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. Being an administrator certainly appeals to parts of me - I enjoy the organization and task oriented work. I also have no competition because I am the only admin in the office. But it's definitely not my passion, and not something that I am okay with having take me away from the rest of my entire life for ten hours a day. Who says I HAVE to work and do all of these things that are not my passion? My passions are my kids, writing, reading...my passion is myself. None of these things are fulfilled at this job. My input is ignored, my words have no weight. My position is not valuable enough (in the eyes of everyone else but me) to garner respect. That is NOT part of any of my passions.

B) Little to no appreciation. I am constantly looked at to fix things. I am constantly looked at for the answers. I feel as if I'm taken advantage of and not appreciated - those are hard things to feel on a regular basis. I feel as if I work extremely hard and have since the beginning of my term at this current job. I walked into a start-up...had no idea that was what I was doing, and I hit the ground running and earned the respect of the contractors that were working for us. But strangely enough, I never earned the respect from the higher-ups in my company. I did A LOT of REALLY hard work and never received a thank you, a good job, nothing. And trust me, after the amount of work I did - I deserved it. Of that fact, I have no allusions. I constantly feel like I am a supporting character who is used to make the main characters shine.

C) There is little room for expansion - and I've seen that firsthand. I applied for a different position within my company and was rejected. I don't think I was really even considered, and had the fact thrown in my face more than once. It stung. Really stung. I could have really excelled at that position. I accepted the fact that it was not my time for progression, and settled back into my current position - but again, there is no room for advancement and I fear that the longer I stay in this position, the more everyone around me depends on me and the harder it will be for me to make any sort of moves in or outside of the company.

D) And most important - it pulls me away from every other important thing to me. I've missed my children's school performances, school parties, ballgames, homework time...all sorts of things for this job. And I get that most people would not give me much sympathy because hey, everyone gives those things ups. But...why do we? Why is work so much more important than family? I think it's only because we make it that way. As I said before, there are so many things that my family could go without and still be happy. And I wonder if we did that, and those "things" were replaced with my being there and my time with my family, how much happier in the end we would all be. My kids miss me. I miss them. And to set myself up for success in all the things I personally want for ME - I may need to rethink this working full time thing.

I'm contemplating ways on how to get there. I could ask if I could go down to part time and see how that works. Maybe gradually cut working out and once summer comes and the kids are out of school, stop working completely and be at home with them. Enjoying their shining, happy faces and having adventures every day again. The thought of that just makes me happy, and I can only imagine how I'd feel if that were really reality. Not to mention all the time I'd be opening up to work on my writing, and work on myself. The important things.

A job that's going nowhere is really not all that important. 

So, I'll be chatting about my goals for the New Year pretty often. They are going to be part of what defines my year and defines my time. I'm working on a list with things kind of mapped out; I've always worked better when working off a list.

Once that ball drops on New Years Eve, I'll be catching it and keeping it off the ground the entire year.

Rejection.

I have always felt it. 

Sometimes I wonder if I feel so much rejection in so many avenues of my life mostly because I am constantly rejecting myself. 

I'm feeling it tonight. Major. 

It's Christmas week, my birthday week...and amidst all of the celebrations, I still feel alone. There are eight other people around and I feel alone, rejected, ignored and not important. It's like it never goes away. I can't make it stop and I can't make it feel any better. 

Let's talk about my birthday. 

Every single year, something horrible happens. Or rather, it feels like something horrible happens. Maybe to other people, the things that happen on or around my birthday are no big deal, but I have always just wanted my birthday to be special. My mother, father, family really never made the effort to make my birthday a special event. I'm born two days after Christmas and I've always gotten the, "Here is your birthday AND Christmas gift - enjoy!" and the, "sorry you can't have a party, we are all broke from the holiday and anyway, no one would come because everyone is too busy celebrating Christmas!" 
  
All I've ever really wanted was a nice, beautiful birthday that belonged to me. A day where everyone who loved me did their best to help me feel beautiful, special, important. Someone who loved me holding my hand, kissing my cheek and then handing me a lovely little gift wrapped perfectly and containing something thoughtful. A wonderful dinner, then a quiet drive home, romantically making love to the person I love and falling asleep in their arms to the sound of their breathing. No nonsense, no drama, no feeling rejected - just simple perfection. 

Instead, it always feels as if my birthday is about everything else BUT me. 

And maybe it's selfish. I don't know. I don't really much care anymore, because I feel as if I deserve just ONE birthday that is perfect. 

I put painstaking detail into my children's birthdays. Whether I make them big or small, I make them special. I make the birthday child feel special. I do the same with my significant other, if you can call him that - at the moment I can barely stand to look at him without feeling utter disappointment, despair and...rejection. 

So back on on track - my birthday this year, my 31st was probably the best I have had in many years, maybe even my life. There was a very special birthday a few years ago where my best friend threw a surprise party for me and I was VERY happy, feeling very special. This birthday was great, all except a few things that I feel should have been better. 

My Aunt, with whom we have spent the holiday with (a bit of a whim, but very nice and very fulfilling) planning an extremely nice dinner at a restaurant that required reservations. Nine of us got dressed up (my children looked SO ADORABLE, C in his pink shirt and tie and N in her poofy skirt that looked like frosting) and ventured out in the snow to have a wonderful, delicious and conversationally satisfying meal at a beautiful restaurant. 

The only thing missing was the connection between my mate and I. 

This was enough to ruin the entire evening for me. 

I put on my prettiest smile. I'm so good at that. I can be dying on the inside and you would never even know it. And I was...dying on the inside on the night of my birthday. 

My mate has said maybe five words to me in the last four days. We had a pretty awful fight, which culminated in him cutting me to the bone and making me cry, and I have refused to reconcile with him until he comes to me with some sort of an apology. I've dug my heels in, this is how it is, I'm not budging. Period. 

And because I am not budging, I am creating an entire ball of Rejection that is sitting right in the middle of my chest. Because my heels are dug in, I sat at my birthday dinner, next to the most beautiful man I have ever known - let alone called my own - and sobbed on the inside because we had zero connection. 

I looked lovely (well, as lovely as a person who hates herself can feel she looks), the company of my family was overwhelmingly satisfying, my children were happy and content, the atmosphere was delightful and....my birthday was miserable because the one person who I needed to make things 100% perfect for me was also digging in his heels and refusing to acknowledge me.

And it continues.

Rejection is the worst feeling in the world. Hands down. 

Everything Is All Your Fault....Didn't You Know?

Really, didn't you know?

You don't know me, but I don't really know myself...so we are in the exact same boat. The only purpose for this blog (at the moment) is to condition myself back into writing something down at least a few times a week and also to get some things out and "on paper" to reflect on. 

I'm not quite sure when I lost that reflection time. Maybe sometime between moving back from Oklahoma to Texas and starting to work again after 7 years "off", starting a new relationship as I went through a divorce, raising two kids and trying to acclimate them to their new life...all while dealing with one kid's learning disability and the other kid's acute emotions. 
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Of course I lost my reflection time and...myself...in that hectic process. Not that I could have really helped it. So many other avenues were demanding my attention and there was precious little time left for myself. 

Well, that needs to change. 

It's apparent. I'm starting to fall back into old habits. Days riddled with anxieties and trying to control the uncontrollable. I'm starting to hate myself - again. Once you get to that place where you look at yourself in the mirror every single day and spend more time picking yourself apart than loving yourself, you know you've got a problem. 

"You're ugly. You're fat. Look at you, you've turned into a slob. You are 31 years old and still don't know how to fix your hair. Everyone looks better than you. Everyone is smarter. Everyone is happier and can manage things. You can't manage anything. You fail at life. You suck. No one loves you, no one can really stand you, no one takes you seriously. You are less than mediocre, you are ridiculous. What is wrong with you that you cannot ever be happy? You can't stay on task, you are not disciplined with your body. You don't show love, you aren't nice. Everyone hates you and you have no friends. You are worthless. You are WORTHLESS."

Yep. This is how I speak to myself. See how much I love ME? Is it a wonder that I cannot accept anything good? That I find myself in a constant state of unrest, of exhaustion? It's exhausting to beat yourself up on a regular basis. 
Why do we do these things to ourselves? Why do I do this to myself? Do I really believe that everything is my fault? Do I really have control over anything when I treat myself this way? The only thing it seems that I have control over is how poorly I treat myself. 

This stuff is hard. I'm avoiding it. I'm worried that I will get into the dregs of self-examination and everyone will think I'm crazy and leave. I guess it helps that I don't have many people in my life to begin with (which is something else on the list of things I am wanting to work on this year). I am hoping that with my closing blog post in December of 2013, I will have a better perspective, a better life - one that is full of laughter and happiness and ME. I'm ready to show up in my own life. 

I need to come to the acceptance that if people don't understand, if they leave, if they think I am crazy - then that is okay. It's not about them - it's about me. 

I'm not sure when I got into the mindset of "It's all your fault". I don't ever remember a different way of thinking about myself and the things around me, which makes me sad. I should have had someone around telling me how precious and wonderful I was. Maybe later in life I did, I just couldn't see it or accept it. I have a hard time accepting anything good because I am in a constant state of "It's all your fault." 
I'm not sure how I will go about changing that way of thinking, but I am going to try. I think at this point, I have no choice. The time for choices is over and the time for change is now. 

I'm excited, and nervous. I'm always nervous - which is something else that I am determined to change. By the end of 2013, I am vowing right here and right now to slice my stupid anxieties in half. I will be poised, confident, sure of myself. I will walk into a room and be proud of who I am, instead of hunched over and trying not to bring attention to myself. I will walk tall, speak loudly, smile and laugh and people will be naturally drawn to me and my personality. The nerves will float away into the universe and cease to matter. 

At the end of 2013, I will be using the phrase "It's all your fault" in a completely different light. I will be using it as...it's all my fault that I am fabulous. 

I have the tools, I have the knowledge. I know the work that needs to be done. I need to set some goals, write some things down in a notebook to carry with me. I need a prayer journal, some place to sit and write. I need a good and quiet area that is all my own. I need to create my own support and not only give up some of the control - but also allow others to carry their own responsibilities and not do everything for them. 

First step when I make it home from vacation is to start creating my area. There is a perfect little corner spot in my beautiful blue and white bedroom. I need a comfy chair, ottoman, lamp and tiny table. A basket to throw my notebooks (of which I plan to have plenty) and an assortment of pens, my laptop accessories. On my table will go a few inspiration photos in tiny and bright frames, my books on writing from my Aunt and a coaster for a glass of water with lemon and a spoonful of sugar. It will be MY area. MY space. My sacred spot of creating. 

I will invest in myself and in my health and do this for me. And then I will keep on investing.