Throughout my latest endeavor I made myself a lot of promises.  I won’t get too involved, I’ll be careful, I’ll be smart, I’ll be realistic, I won’t take anything to seriously.  I’ll take everything one day at a time.

I have stuck with almost all of them.  Okay, mostly none of them.  Okay, some of them.

The truth is that staying realistic meant that I knew that eventually I would get hurt.  Staying realistic also means that if I feel something I have to let myself feel it.  I can’t just pretend like everything is fine.

Being a woman is a lot like being on an amusement park ride.  More so in the puke your guts out sort of way than in the excitement sort of way.

Well, maybe a mix.  Altogether life is full of a lot of surprises.  The interesting thing about the unknown and its varying aspects is that your character and prowess are not measured by what gets thrown at you but instead by what you do about it.

Lately my life has been in most categories more of the same.  I am becoming dissatisfied with the norm.  Up to this point my reaction to this level of restlessness has been to complain, whine, and continue, changing nothing.

Many times we’ve all heard the phrase that when life hands you lemons, make lemonade, or if we continue performing the exact same actions but expecting different results this is only the definition of insanity.  Now I don’t intend to Sarah Palin on about this sort of thing, but instead to make this point:  I can whine and complain, or I can change.  I can become someone I would rather be, or I can become day by day more negative and more miserable and thereby turn from the Pollyanna I once was into a raving depressed lunatic.

I keep doing the same things and I complain like a jerk when I achieve the same results.  Parts of life feel impossible to tackle.  This way of living is completely unnecessary and I am at least 93% to blame.

I can’t do much about circumstances.  Life will throw me things that frustrate and hurt me until the end of time.  I can, however, do what I can to become resilient, and yet have a heart.

I have always liked change…but far more so when it was put upon me and far less so when I had to be the catalyst.

This seems impossible.  But I can complain all day long and I feel providence itself will lead me right back to the same place every time.

Mirror.

I have been strongly encouraged to bring a date to my work holiday party in a few weeks.  When I said that I was pretty sure I’d be showing up solo to this function, our receptionist said encouragingly, well, you’ve got a few weeks.  Surely you could meet someone in that amount of time!

I had a dark J.D. fantasy moment right there—where suddenly I grabbed her by the shoulders and joyfully exclaimed, “Really?!  Thank you!  Three weeks?!  Oh my goodness!  And to think that all these years I have been turning away amazingly awesome handsome honorable suitors left and right because I didn’t think I had ENOUGH TIME.  Thank goodness you have solved all of my problems!  I will be sure to bring a date now!”  And then I shook her and slammed her head into the table a few times.  She looked at me and blinked and said, “You’re welcome,” with a smile.

I begin to wonder if the restlessness I feel lately is not restlessness at all—only fear.  Fear that now that my life is more stable (I have an advanced degree and a relatively stable job) that people will begin to notice that my lack of bringing handsome men around on my arm had nothing to do with the fact that I was busy but instead has everything to do with the fact that I am completely undesirable.

I have been processing through some things lately that I haven’t really been open to sharing with people.  As a result I have been severely sleep deprived.  Normally I am sleep deprived because I can’t think—rather I am thinking so much I just can’t rest.  It has been altogether different this time.  Something in my life feels so gaping, so unfinished, that I don’t want the day to be over.  I have felt this way before from time to time but it has never interfered with my daily life to this degree.  I am trying not to be overly concerned, and I do try from time to time to talk to someone.

Recently a friend said to me that the hope would be that I could find an activity that would allow me to completely clear my mind and focus on something altogether different.  Or better yet to focus on nothing.  The specific suggestion was exercise.

This got me thinking a lot about coping mechanisms—the things we do sometimes to survive, thrive…escape.

The last couple of nights have been really difficult for me.  Two nights ago I was tired but could not bring myself to end the day.  Something felt missing and I did everything I could (save for sleep) that I could think of to distract  myself.  I can’t even seem to be productive in these moments; it is only a perfect state of utter restlessness.

This is a new experience for me.  I have been hurt, elated, overwhelmed, “had a lot on my mind,” and more, but the state of…the gnawing sensation that something in my life is incomplete…it just feels like there is a giant hole in my life and I must not rest until it’s filled.  Problem is I can’t be certain where the hole even is much less how I go about filling it.

Someone encouraged me recently, “you tend to be the kind of person who just bounces around from opportunity to opportunity; you are satisfied with variety.  You should consider having a few things in your life that you are very strategic about—things that you hammer away at for a period of time and then see results, breakthrough…”

My one friend tells me I should find a mind-blowing hobby.  Someone else says I should be more strategic.  My roommates and I are doing a leadership group in our home once a week.  We’re studying priorities and discipline and how these things make you a better employee, a stronger leader.  Perhaps a generally more successful and efficient person.

Anyone who knows me knows that discipline is the one thing in my life I have felt like I could not tackle.  So much so that I pretty much don’t try.

I haven’t really resolved to a specific routine since obtaining my full time job.  I don’t know why I expected to.  I have never really had a specific routine that I’ve followed in life.  I have indeed kind of bounced around.

In my line of work we call that putting out fires.

Maybe I have been limiting myself to putting out the fires and that’s why there is this huge part of  me that feels so vastly unsettled.

For being logically (i.e., job, etc.) fairly put together, I actually for the first time in years feel just a bit lost.  I hope I don’t drive myself crazy trying to find the missing piece.

I can think of only a few coping mechanisms that I have used that don’t involve a damaging vice (alcohol, food, sabotage…you know the drill).  They do arguably damage the environment, but it depends on how you structure the argument.

I don’t bust these out very often (mostly because it is rare that I get really upset, and mostly because I generally don’t like people to know what I am up to).  Even when I lived by myself sometimes I would just get in the car and drive to nowhere in particular.  In every place I have ever lived I have mapped out a relatively short and a relatively long “loop” that is not too complicated to drive, not too far from my house, and either fairly out of site or crowded enough that no one will notice me.

Sometimes when I get stressed it helps if I go somewhere that is completely crowded with people.  Think concert, conference, professional athletic event.  I have gone to a few of these functions alone.  This one is hit or miss, though; sometimes energizing and sometimes depressing.  Almost always I leave these situations feeling very introspective.  That can be helpful or dangerous depending on how I had started out.

The end all be all though, when I am raging mad, break stuff mad, hurt someone mad—when I am so hurt that I can’t see a pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel much less imagine a way out, only one thing has ever helped me reach through the anger and try to find the root issue:

Music so loud that it makes every cell in my body hurt coupled with a scalding hot shower.  If I start to sing along to the music I have probably reached a place so dark that I don’t know what to do and I am seemingly trying to call myself out.  If I am quiet, I am probably finding a way to cope.

I have often wondered why in my darkest moments that rage is the only accessible emotion.  It happens so rarely that I take little time to examine it—at least in comparison to the things I do take time to examine.  Altogether I am fortunate that I can sometimes channel my emotions in a way that I can postpone the anger until my roommates leave town.  Maybe because when I get that lost in my emotions I don’t want anyone to be present to ask me any questions.

Last week I was pensive and sad (mostly because I couldn’t sleep).  My roommate said she would just leave me alone so I would feel better.  I actually said, “I never want to be left alone.”  It’s true.  There’s never a moment where I don’t want to be the center of attention.  With one exception.  If you hear excessively loud music and glimpse slightly scalded skin, don’t even look at me.

Last night I had a dream that my roommate was betrothed to none other than Barack Obama (yes of course, some poetic license is clearly at work here).  She brought me along to be her right hand woman while she married him in a lavish foreign ceremony.  We were staying in a Trump Tower-like fortress with golden everything that belonged to some sort of a sultan.  The afternoon before her wedding my roommate called me and asked me to come to her suite.  She sat me down and explained that she had fallen in love with the (incredibly handsome) son of the sultan.  She didn’t know how to break it to Barack.

Good grief.  Can you imagine?  The whole world is watching your betrothal to the president of the United States and here you are realizing suddenly that your feelings for the guy were only a farce.

So I go off on my merry way to soul search and see if I can come up with a solution to this problem.  To his credit, Barack had done his job.  He moved my roommate off to this foreign land to stay with a sultan while he stayed in another tower to give her space and yet exclusively court her.  I mean the guy was a champ.  Being the president of the United States does take up a lot of a guy’s time though, and the sultan’s son was allured by my roommate’s beauty and character (like any man would be of course).

So I am running about the sultan’s estate trying to figure out what the heck to do to solve this problem, using my amazing new Obama-blessed iPhone to google things like, ‘how to let him down easy’.  Next thing you know the entire estate is suddenly up in arms and there is media everywhere.  The sultan has had a nervous breakdown.  I soon find out, but manage to hide from the media, that the sultan inadvertently walked in on my roommate and his son.  The looks in their starry eyes were unmistakable.  The sultan suddenly realized that his political plans with Obama were about to go completely out the window and he had hit the deck.

I didn’t sleep at all during the night and my roommate had still not breathed a word to Barack.  The media reported that the sultan was dehydrated or slightly ill and would recover quickly.  The wedding plans were not going to change in his absence.  However, everyone knew that something was going on and people would just not stop gossiping.  The events of the day started bright and early and (oddly golden) signs were posted throughout the estate:  ”The sultan’s condition will not be discussed.”  ”Those discussing the sultan’s condition will be removed from the premises.”  It was a slightly dangerous place.

About the crack of dawn my iPhone rings.  It is Barack himself.  He tells me that he is working on a speech for later in the evening, and would I come over to talk with him about it?  He would like my input because I work with so many young people, and he wants to direct part of the speech to college-age students.  I try to explain that I am likely not the expert he is looking for, but he insists.  I have been staying a few rooms (well, like a wing) over from my roommate and I don’t want to leave her.  But I head out.  Soon I realize that I am walking across the sultan’s estate without shoes.  I run back to get them only to find that the sultan’s people have already started celebrating the wedding and have turned my room into a gift shop.   The room is spinning.  I start asking, where are my shoes?  I wonder, what is going to happen today?  Will my roommate go through with marrying Barack?  If she doesn’t, will I have to give back my iPhone?  What am I going to do?

In the middle of my panic the alarm went off.  I lay there for about 1.5 seconds and actually wonder if I am crazy.  Crazy.

A good friend of mine is right on the edge of falling in love.  I could not be more thrilled.  Or sad.

Selfishness is so awful!

This reminds me of one of the most funny TV episodes I have likely ever seen.  On the day of Monica and Chandler’s wedding on Friends, it is feared that Chandler has decided to leave Monica at the altar.  Everyone is devastated, and then of course must not let Monica know anything is wrong until they have first spoken to Chandler.  Rachel is given the task of stalling Monica and does so by trying to gain Monica’s sympathy for the fact that she has not yet found someone for herself.

It is ironically not funny at all unless you know that Rachel is purely doing this to distract Monica from the situation at hand.  Knowing the whole story makes it completely hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZjrTBD7sJY

All kidding and TV clips aside, I am so overjoyed.  Naturally as I watch a friend walk through any major life change that I have not experienced myself it is a challenge.  I will experience an array of emotions I am sure.  Altogether I will rejoice.  True love is utterly deserved by many, and this one takes the cake.  I am looking forward to seeing the whole thing unfold.

This weekend has been one of a lot, and A LOT, if introspection.  I went on a ‘wilderness retreat’ (complete with wi-fi) this weekend with some girls.  It was a good time, but stretching for my soul.

Normally when I go on these brief soul searching missions I find out things about myself that I knew all along but I still find myself helpless to do anything about.  This time someone confronted me with something that I hadn’t really thought about before.  My life, in the significant parts, has been a history of intense emotional/spiritual experiences.  These experiences really happened and are true/relevant/valid.  However much of what I am and what I find important is emotionally based.

No reason to swing the other way and assume that my emotions/emotional experiences are suddenly invalid, nor to assume that I never exercise my mind (duh, can we say graduate school?!).  However I would like to allow myself some time and space to consider giving more of my time to investing in roots:  faith, habits, the present, reality.

That area of my brain is at best extremely dusty and at worst totally atrophied.  It could get interesting.

Wondering whether life was better before I knew.

Today I went on a tour for work where I probably met at least 20 people I have never met before.  They were all very casual introductions.  I was with my boss who is an intensely humble man, and people seem to sense it, so they are very very polite and kind to him.  People give him a lot of room and a lot of respect.  He deserves it.  Really.

Meanwhile I am still pretty shy during corporate events and  stood behind him like a giant fat scared puppy.  However, I was profoundly affected a few years ago by a little Meg Ryan quote that discusses the importance of using your last name when introducing yourself.  Therefore I am pretty good about standing up, shaking a hand and saying my name loud and clear.

Until today.  Until today when I met the most fabulously handsome guy just sitting there behind his supervisory cubicle at which point I thought to myself good gracious you must be totally too young for me, but I do not care.  You are so handsome and innocent and look at your perfectly tousled hair and could you be any more burly and yet you have this slight edge about you that says at work I am so good, but anywhere else:  bad.

And when he reached for my hand,  I just squeaked.

I hate this statement, but it is true:  a lot is happening, and nothing is happening.

Today I sat in a meeting for work going over our revised benefit policies.  Don’t get me wrong, I am so grateful that I have a job with benefits, and I will never be sorry or depressed about that.  At the same time it took everything that I had, while  sitting there watching some guy in a suit talk about percentages, to not cry.

There is a man in my life that I love but we won’t end up together.  If we do we will have been completely duped, and I worry whether we’d ever really be happy.  It is what it is.  I hate being a woman going through something like this because everything compiles, one thing right on top of the other.  When I have a good day, everything is good.  A bad moment appears and suddenly everything is completely bad.  Everything.

I sat today in the meeting and in my brain my entire life converged in the midst of this benefit lecture.  I realized that I have no family to support, no children for which to use my pre-tax daycare exemption, and wondered if I ever will.  It is sad that so many things in my life are absolutely perfect (and I mean perfect), but I have to find the one missing piece and sit and stare at that?  I feel like in some ways I am a total Pollyanna and in some ways I am the biggest Debbie Downer in the entire world.

Who cries over insurance?  Really?