A New Beginning

It's been my birthday for about 17 minutes now. As I've approached this 28th year of life I've had a lot of time to reflect on who I am and how I've gotten here. So much of that is good and amazes me to think about. I have the brightest little girl that I could have ever asked for. She's a definite source of pride and accomplishment in these years that have felt more accelerated than I ever planned for. Can you really plan for life to go the right way? More and more I've realized that so much of it is a random lottery of events that somehow wiggle out of your hands and are left to the world to sort out. I definitely intended to be somewhere else by the age of 28. I thought I'd be fully educated, have an amazing job that paid well, be married with more than one kid and be living in some suburb in a perfect house with a yard and a dog. These were the plans I laid out for myself before I was even old enough to consider what reality might bring to me instead.

I've spent the better part of this year being a real drag to be around. Having grown frustrated with the station in life that I had assigned myself to, I found myself biting off a lot more than I could chew and attempted to become Super Woman for awhile. In doing so, I lost sight of who I am and what I want. As I've attempted to slow down and really think about where I am, I'm finding that who I am and what I want has changed so much since that original plan I laid out for myself. I've been so concerned with going through the motions of the necessary education, the good corporate citizen, the flawless mother and diligent daughter doing her best to follow a plan that her parents would be proud of that somewhere along the way I stopped thinking about what would make me happy and what would bring me to a place of happiness. Somewhere along the way I lost the ability to smile and instead let the burden of stress and responsibility become my defining way of life. I kept telling myself, "It only has to be this tough for x amount of years and then life can be enjoyable again." I was so wrong. It's time for that to change.

I've felt like nearing the end of my 20's was an indicator that I had lost out. That my time was running out. For some reason I've seen 30 looming ahead as the point of no return. I've had this idea that if I can't get my shit together before 2011 then Id have no chance to ever redeem the time I'd lost. It's madness, is what it is. Rather than feel the need to bust my ass to get my life where I want it in two years, I need to take the time to stop and smell the roses. I need to appreciate what I have and make the necessary changes in my life to get what I want. It's not a degree or a promotion or a house in the suburbs. What I want is no longer a tangible object that I can point to in order to declare my worth and my success. I seek something so much richer and deeper than that.

Lately I've been moved and inspired by the words of someone I don't know and never will. I've been pulled in a new direction and way of thinking at a time when I needed it most. I crave a sense of community and good-will. I am striving to turn these last two years of my twenties into something that I can be proud of - a testament to making myself happy and thus being able to help make the people around me happy. The power of giving and receiving are very strong and have little to do with what you can hold in your hands when you're done with it. It's about how you can fill your heart and your mind with the positivity of the people you surround yourself with. Gone are the days where I follow some set plan of motions that will supposedly make me happy in x amount of years. The point is to live each day to the fullest, not to work toward a day when I can feel like I am full. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? It's not enough to have an end-point in mind but to suffer through on the path to get there.

Today I make a promise to myself to hold true to these things. I lost sight of why I went back to school to begin with. It was never to pursue a degree. I knew it would take me six years to get my bachelor's degree so it was never about that. I craved education and learning. I wanted to fill the spaces in my mind where important names and dates and times were missing. I wanted to feel rewarded in those efforts by having nuggets of knowledge planted where I felt like I had been let down in the past. And that was the case for two years. But then it started to become a burden. I was skating by just to get the class over with. I let myself succumb to stress being a natural effect of getting to my destination when I never put myself on a path to find that destination to begin with. I made the tough - but right - decision for myself to stop. Education isn't necessarily about the money I pour into school and the degree that I get as a result. It would help in the future but I've never wanted to climb any sort of ladder that my bachelor's degree would help me with. So long as we have a roof over our heads and can do the things we want to do, I don't aspire to be educated in any way other than the richness of learning and craving more information. So long as that isn't how I'm being fulfilled, taking on that stress just isn't worth it. So I've let it go. And that feels right.

This is the time where I need to devote 100% to my job so long as I am committed to that job. I am going to attempt to come at every day I step foot in my work place with positivity and an open mind and heart. I will do my best not to let the frustrations I have with people and broken processes ruin my day. Nothing will be achieved by that so now is the time to start the effort in reshaping the way I manage and deal with those parts of my day. But when I leave the office, I am committing myself to focusing on what matters - fulfillment of my heart, mind and body and fulfillment of my daughter's heart, mind and body. I am committing myself to help support her in school and to help her in any way I can with the activities that she has found herself drawn and devoted to. I am committing myself to a healthier lifestyle in which I try to cut out the garbage that I put into my body on a regular basis. I am committed to helping remove the excess that has come with seven years of not having enough self-esteem to put action where my mouth is. It's partly about looking better but it's so much more about feeling better in a way that I haven't felt in as long as I can remember.

As we near the third anniversary of living with my parents and into the stretch of the last year here, I find myself focused more and more on that goal I set for myself so long ago. Summer/fall 2010, the mommy and baby team on our own. It looms in the near future and as my mind is reshaping and I find myself motivated to let that reshaping help change my habits and actions, I become more and more driven to make this change be a big one. As we exist today, we both spend more time in our living room than surrounded by people. We both tend to want to curl up on the couch with the TV, video games and computers than we do wanting to dive into the community we're not a part of. I am committed to spending this next year giving new things a chance. I am promising my daughter and myself that we will spend more time outside of our comfort zones and submerged in a world that neither of us have ever really let ourselves be exposed to. As her mother it is my job to teach her how to have an open mind and to crave new experiences and new ideas. I've been failing in that department and I am vowing to change that now. I've always been so much more content to stick to myself that I've let so many opportunities and chances pass by. When I sit alone on a Saturday night and wonder why I don't have anyone to call at a moment's notice, I have no one to blame but myself. When my cell phone rarely rings and I can count my honest to god friends on very few fingers, I have no one to blame but myself. Having a child was no excuse to become a recluse. My goal in life was never to make a couch heavier. I expected and wanted more for myself. I now realize that there's still time to fix that.

My path in life isn't set in stone. My experiences are what I make them. No one else is going to come and magically change where I'm headed. There isn't some fairy dust that is going to be sprinkled over my head at any point that suddenly gets me off of my ass and out living this life. I've been content to wait for life to happen for so long that I think I forgot that it's me who has to make life happen. My goal may seem lofty and the changes are many but at the end of the day it just comes down to feeling fulfilled and happy. When I can finally say that I am both of those things, then my mission will be accomplished. Until then? It's time to get to living a life worth having.