In the last few months I have broken up with my step-father, my mother, a few friends, and last week, with my job.

I believe I’m trending.

The advantage of going through very stressful times is that it takes so much out of you that you only have energy left for what is important, for what serves you. At least that is how this has worked for me. I simply don’t have time to play games any more. I don’t have the energy to keep trying to hang with the cool kids. I’ll be 50 in a year, and I was, until this last year or so, still trying to hang with those I thought were “cool”. Of course I generally defined “cool” as those who wouldn’t want to hang with me.

“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”  Groucho Marx 

I used to care what people thought of me. I used to really, really care, and would spend my time morphing from one pleasing personality to another. I would be whatever I thought people wanted me to be. Do that enough and you start to wonder who you actually are. When I was a kid I learned to walk carefully on eggshells and to constantly assess the emotional temperature of a room. That’s what you did in my family. I thought that’s what everybody did. Then you grow up still figuring that you need to walk on those eggshells, that the only way to be safe is to wear that mask you made. That at any moment of any day you will be rejected and abandoned. It’s a shaky foudation to build on.

Shane Koyczan is a Canadian spoken poet, he wrote these words.

“So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us

That we’d be lonely forever

That we’d never meet someone

to make us feel like the sun

was something they built for us

in their tool shed”

 

“… could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moments before it’s about to fall”

 

Kids can be cruel. So can families.

“we decided to smash all things we used to be   ….

… believe that they were wrong … we stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called”

So. My life lately has been a lot of giving up what I was told I was. A lot of moving on. I don’t know where I am going, but I am moving slowly forward.