Choices......

For me the last half a year or so has brought enormous changes and I still don’t feel as though I’m hitting the target. What I’ve written here in this blog leaves me cold and wondering why I’m still fluffing over the important stuff in my life and for how long I will keep doing it.

The latest developments in my life have seen my husband move into the ex-husband state well and truly. He’s decided that rather than pursuing me and trying to find ways of getting me back he will give me all the freedom I want and go to Greece to work. It was a move that surprised me, I have to admit. He told me last Sunday but on the day before I was suddenly hit with this enormous sense of freedom and I felt as though I great weight had been lifted off me. Ever since he told me about his plans we have been able to have decent conversations almost as though we are longstanding friends.

It’s there though, the sadness and the grief. I can detect in his voice and I feel it in myself. All the subjects that are now carefully avoided because they could cause arguments, the overly cheerful tone of conversation and the need to be reassured that somehow the love we once shared will always be there, that it wasn’t all in vain and that there’s still hope. I struggle to keep my eye on the ball, having to remind myself what it was that made me call it quits in the first place and what has made me refuse to take him back no matter what he did or promised. I also find myself grieving and battling a real sense of loss. Now I have to face the sad fact that my second marriage failed and try to learn something from it.

It occurred to me that even though it’s silly to grieve for something that you created (it was my choice to separate and stay separated), it is something I have to do. We are so afraid of our feelings, of experiencing any emotional pain whatsoever. Pain cannot hurt us though. It may seem to be a contradiction to say that but emotional pain is perhaps even useful if we view it as a sign post rather than anything else. My grief, my pain, tells me of a fear I have of being alone and unwanted, of being unloved. As this part of my life unravels so are other parts, like the way I think of my career and work in general, and the value it really holds in my life. The way I look at myself as a woman is changing and so is the way I monitor my thoughts. I have come to realise that I spend a lot of time in some sort of fantasy land imaging what it would be like to be in a functioning relationship while romanticising the whole in a big way. I have lived in there, doing that, for decades to cope with a life that I quite frankly haven’t found to be very rewarding so far. Hitting the 40s is well and truly making me face my own inability to create the life I want and that I think I deserve.

The question is now, how do you create the life you want? If you believe all the hype surrounding The Secret and those who believe in the law of attraction the way is to feel it. It’s not as easy as you may think because most of us programmed to not put too much faith in anything. We are well and truly brainwashed into thinking that nothing can come easily to you and that you have to work hard for every single break in life. We are a bunch of “half empty glass” people who rather err on the side of caution. We don’t like to be disappointed. I’m slowly trying to change my thinking there though because to be honest, and this is my only real reason for doing it, working hard with little to show for it in the end but more hard work stinks. I think I would rather believe that things can come easily at this stage, I have nothing to lose in doing so, and if it helps me attract good things into my life all the more power to me and my new way of thinking. If it doesn’t I will deal with it later (and demand an explanation from the Universe and Rhonda Byrne who wrote the book The Secret).

Thinking about finding new love, especially love that will last, is probably the hardest right now. When the body aches to be touched and your soul to be warmed by another’s love and presence it amplifies the loneliness. It’s easy to get impatient and angry, to hold the Universe or the opposite sex responsible.

Here in the Western world (or at least in the city) we all seem to suffer from the need for instant result, anything else just won’t do. If we don’t get instant results we get nervous and suspect or even see it as failure. We work like that, cook like that (if we cook at all), we eat like that, travel like that and treat ourselves, our families and our friends like that. The process and journey is worth nothing; only the result holds value and meaning to us.

So many of us blame our parents for how we feel about ourselves and the lack of perceived success in life, basically for what we have turned out like. I used to do that as well but I have come to the conclusion that it’s a rather fatalistic way of looking at what I have become. At every point, in every moment of our lives, there is always a choice. We can’t always choose what others do to us but we can choose how we perceive what is done to us, the way we remember it and most of all what we learn from it. A man named David Pelzer wrote a book about his childhood and it’s a horrific story of what he endured. Yet, David went on to not only survive but to become successful in life. What makes some people succeed, survive and heal after something like that and what makes others broken, awful and unhappy? I can’t help but think that choice plays a big part in it.

I used to have these awful nightmares about an incident that happened with my first husband. His hands around my neck, the smell of alcohol on his breath and the way he looked at me when he told me that he was going to kill me because I didn’t deserve to live. Every detail of it played back in those dreams. The way I went from feeling fear to pure survival mode with my mind almost calmly starting looking for ways I could get through it alive, to get him to let go of me, to calm down and to hopefully fall into an alcohol induced sleep so that there would be peace again and I would be safe. It’s a state of alert, the adrenalin pumps through you and your senses are heightened to the max. I would experience all that in my dreams. It had a grip on me that I just couldn’t imagine would ever let go. Then someone quite calmly told me one day that I ought to change the way I remembered it all. I thought she was nuts but because of who she was I decided that I would try to while not holding much faith in how well it would work. In fact, I had no faith in it at all. I closed my eyes and very reluctantly went back to that moment and although it was nowhere near as vivid as I would recall it in my nightmares I imagined myself turning into water. As water I trickled through his hands and down the wall. I became a stream that ran down the hallway and out through the gap underneath the front door to freedom. The nightmare never returned and the need to feel like a victim started to dissolve although it would take time to heal all of the emotional wounds that I had.

Perhaps it’s really that simple. Perhaps all we have to do is to change our minds and remain open to the possibilities that are waiting out there. I hope so because the powers at be ought to know that I currently fail to see any other solution to how I feel right now.