Caterwauling

Happy anniversary to me. I’ve gotten through one year on the job without killing anybody (or myself) or blogging about it. Whee! Celebration indeed!

I’ve learned, I’ve grown, I’ve seen more of the world than I ever dreamed possible. I’ve had hornets butterflies and I’ve seen victories. I’ve had days when I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life and others where I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a better place to be.

They say the journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step. Well, judging by my car, I’ve driven 21,000 miles, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ve logged more hours and done more commuting in a year than most do in three.

What a year it’s been. It was my “get back on my feet” year — there was a lot of convalescing done in my heart and in my head. But I got back to work, I got back into writing for myself, and I recovered my ambition to rejoin the human race.

This year is the “get back on my feet financially” one. As well as a continuation of rejoining the land of the living. There are certain life milestones that I assumed would never be for me. It’s not that I never wanted them — I just never figured they’d come to me. And it seemed that no matter how many hours I’ve ever worked or how many jobs I juggled at one time, I never felt like I caught up, let alone got ahead. And all of that came at the expense of not only being forced to start my career all over again, but also at passing up people who could have possibly been those with whom I could have been reaching those life milestones.

When I was leaving my old job, someone asked me why I felt compelled to blog so much of my life — in her (paraphrased) words, why couldn’t I just go out and find someone to date and just talk things out of my system and move on from them? I would have preferred to have a real, live human, of course. In response, I had inquired when I was supposed to find the time to meet someone when I had an ankle bracelet chaining me to the desk — I was too burned out to go be “on” for potential dates.

Those who’ve been with me through my many blog incarnations know that the format has changed, but not radically. I have gone from trying to teach lessons from my trials to just telling you, in the most roundabout way possible, what is happening in my world. But it occurs to me that by leaving out so much of the scary/sad/terrifying, I’m also depriving you of the evolution I’ve experienced to get to the other side of the moat.

I’ve met so many of you during the past year. And while we all aspire to be one thing online, it’s the offline characters who are truly captivating. I just wish there were a world in which we could all blog freely — because isn’t that the point? Growing together, learning from each other, enjoying who we are and having fun finding out exactly who that person is.

But we hide so much, and well, I guess that’s the way it goes and always will. I look at it as dating — you don’t want to know everything and then some about the person from the first minute. You want things to unfold, to incrementally get to know someone, to like the good points they show you before you get to the less-charming idiosyncrasies. And if there’s never another date, well, they get to remember you when you had your game-face on. It’s when the facade crumbles that we get into trouble, anyway. It’s when they decide they didn’t want you after all, or that they can’t live with the whole package.

Which is why I’m happy where I am for now. I can be me. It’s like you were previously in a relationship where someone tried valiantly to mold you into their version of perfect, and then you find someone who not only tolerates, but maybe even enjoys, you.

Imagine all the wondrous things we would be able to achieve if our heads weren’t so jam-packed with the sandbags of constant worry weighing us down. To take all the stressors and replace them with dreams, achievement, unwinding, pampering.

The world is missing out on so much — we deprive the universe of our talents and capabilities and creations when we’re fretting about dumb shit that won’t even matter when we’re dead.

I face today, and every day thereafter, knowing how far I’ve come (and knowing that I’ve traveled these roads twice before). So I’m not where I’d planned to be. But apparently the universe had a different plan for me than I did, and it’s in motion. And I can’t wait to see where I am next year at this time. …

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 8:36 AM and is filed under Existential Meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.