There isn't a Neil song to title this one after...

(For five days I have sat on this blog unwilling to post it. It was a rambling of things I was feeling and I just wanted to write them down. There are countless rantings that I do that no one ever sees, which is probably a good thing. A friend of mine asked me yesterday what was wrong so I decided to post it. It's not well written or even gramatically edited, and will probably leave you confused. But I could care less about those things right now,)


“With the good comes the bad.” That’s the story of my life. Most people would say they would welcome the bad just to have the good. I am not most people.

Four years ago Chris and I divorced. Oddly enough, that was a personal high in my life! I was free from a loveless marriage and able to stay friends with the man I’d shared the biggest part of my life with. How lucky I was to have that! I had my kids, my freedom and had no cares in the world. Not a month later my world crashed around me. The turmoil that I went through secretly for four months nearly ended me. I’d felt I’d lost everything. I lost 25 pounds in a month, went through a stage where I cared very little about what I looked like, and I drank more than I should have. Finally unwilling to take this pain on by myself any longer, I decided to share it with the one person I thought would never turn their back on me. That didn’t end well. My only option was escape. I talked to my ex-husband and told him I would be moving and he supported me. So I did. My family wasn’t very happy about this spur of the moment decision, but if I was going to get through this I had to do it anyway. So I moved to Florida. I had a handful of friends and I could be someone that no one knew again. I was on my own and doing something most single mothers would be terrified to do. I was happy. And therein lies the problem. I got so comfortable being happy over the next few months that I didn’t notice the changes going on in my ex-husbands life. The woman he was seeing was filling his head with ‘realistic notions’ of how a divorced couple were supposed to act, and sadly he was listening. Threats were thrown and my lawyer suggested I move back to Alabama to avoid the possibility of losing my house there.  I was finally happy again and I didn’t WANT to leave! But I had no choice.

So I went back to Alabama with nothing but the miserable. I didn’t want to be there! But like a trooper, I play the hand that has been dealt me and I carry on. I sweep all my problems into a corner of the room and throw every rug in the house over them and I put my fake smile on and live my life. I lived a big life of solitude for the following year. No interest in making friends or anything. I was active in church, but that was fake too. Not my relationship with God, but the desire to be at the church I was at. I tried to do what I thought would be best for my kids, but that eventually ended as well. Sadly, yes I stopped going to church all together. Although I never stopped talking to God, I should have stayed in church-just a different one. My life wasn’t getting any better on the inside.

My second summer home was mostly spent here at my house. I had gotten my own pool so that I wouldn’t even have to go to my parents to take my kids swimming. Not much more than that. I muddled through the school year, staying busy at the school and trying to find time to be alone. I had become friends with a girl from baseball and we started doing things together. When my third summer living back in Jasper rolled around, I’d have to say that I spent the biggest part of that summer drunk. It was nice. For a while anyway. I could easily see myself as an alcoholic because I enjoy drinking my problems away. Knowing this about myself, I know that I would never allow that to happen.

I got through the next school year the same way as the one before. Keeping busy. Not allowing myself time for any sort of personal fulfillment. I was made fun of, called a hermit and a recluse, but I didn’t care. With happiness comes disaster right? Over the course of the previous three years I had gone on three ‘actual’ dates. All of which were just first dates. I never went on a second date with any of them. Last thing I wanted was a man in my life complicating things. As the school year closed, for whatever reason I decided to try a different approach at ‘dating’. I was going to go at it from a man’s angle. It was fun for a while, then I got attached. It was like throwing a tree hugger in the middle of a battlefield with a loaded M-16. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?! You don’t give feelings to a person who doesn’t know what to do with them! You should probably feel sorry for the person on the receiving end of these feelings.

So here I am four years later. Time for an emotional high! I find my biological father, go see him, talk to him and get the internal peace that I’ve needed for twenty years! I was on top of the world! Nothing could bring me down…right?

Of all the lows I’ve had in my life, nothing has hurt me more than the one I was about to face. In an agonizing process that has taken four years to complete, I have all but lost my best friend.  It’s hard watching something that you need so badly in your life wither away and die. The nail in the coffin (as the saying goes) were the words  “I don’t want to hear about anything unless it’s good.” when I went  to them about silly relationship problems. How do you come back from that?  I can be fake-happy for everyone else, but why should I have to be with you? The pain of losing this closeness with this person over the past month alone has left me feeling more alone than I’ve ever felt. I haven’t done a very good job at handling all the things that are going on in my life all at once, the highs or the lows. I know my inability to deal with them has hurt people around me, and that makes me sad. Maybe one day I can learn to focus on the good and filter out the bad. Until then, I keep my guard up always leery of things being good in my life. Hopeful that one day I can let that go.

I am quite a backwards person when it comes to my emotions. I’ve been this way for years. When I’m worried, I get mad. When I’m mad, I cry. When I’m sad, I work harder at my ‘fake happy’.  When I’m happy, I get scared. When I’m scared, I make jokes… I spend the biggest part of my life making jokes.