Yesterday I spent some time shopping (didn’t buy anything) and got my hair did. When I came home, I was exhausted and spent about an hour submitting my resumé for anything and everything I could think of because that didn’t take much energy and then thought, “I’ll take a nap.” I should have set an alarm, because I didn’t wake up until 0400. I didn’t even notice that my phone was ringing, I was so out of it, so I have phone calls to return today. I can only think that it was my body’s way of saying “you thought you were well? Not so fast, Leslie.” However, I feel 100 percent better this morning after having spent an hour or so with Sam drinking coffee and talking about our lives. I may or may not have drunk most of the pot myself.
On the plus side, now I know exactly how much coffee it takes to rip my stomach in half.
I’ve spent more time off the grid because I was starting to feel like I didn’t have anything to write about. There’s only so many times I want to hear that my mother is dead, much less sounding like a broken record to you. But who am I kidding? I am a broken record most of the time….. hello, Dana…. hello, Argo…. hello, incessant tapes running through my head until they’re done….
I’m going out with someone new tonight. She works in the science/medical field, which is completely different from me and yet we have enough to connect on to make conversation. I don’t know if there will be a romantic spark, but I do know that I want to spend time with her regardless. I like having smart people around me, and she’s definitely that. We’re meeting at the Watergate, and I told her I’d never been there before and I might have to geek out and take pictures. In terms of the United States, I live where the history comes from, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard.
Because we both have Gmail, I sent her a calendar invite, and she commented on it… and I’m like, “oh my God… she might think I’m a real adult or something.” I live and die by Google Calendar because if I didn’t, I’d never make it anywhere. The Google Suite is basically my ADD medication.
So far, I’ve been on a couple of “first dates” that ended up being great friendships because you can’t force a romantic spark, especially when you’re not looking for one. “Dates” in quotation marks because I could force myself to leave the house and have a good time, but seriously still stuck on processing my old life to make room for a new one. I still don’t know that I’m ready, but what I do know is that unless I start dating the girl that delivers my pizza, it’s not going to happen in the comfort of my house.
Although as I have said before, if I do start dating the girl that delivers my pizza, I already know three things:
- She is employed.
- She has a vehicle.
- She already knows the way to my house.
The joke there is that I’ve only had one woman deliver a pizza to me in the entire time I’ve been ordering.
I do want to get out and do new things so that I have more to write about than the past, but depression and anxiety have stopped me from doing many of the things I’ve wanted because I just didn’t have the energy (see above). I want to be able to tell new stories instead of continuing to focus on old ones, but at the same time, it helps for my blog to lag behind my real life so that I have some perspective on what’s happening rather than it being stream-of-consciousness. Sometimes it is, but most of the time what you’re getting is reflection, and hopefully the peace that comes with it. I feel like I have reconciled all I can reconcile and everything else is left up to me.
I didn’t want to give up Argo or Dana, but I did. It “takes two to tango” is a thing, but I very fully own that a lot of it was my fault entirely. There are so many things I could have done differently over the last three years, and reflection on what I’ve done (and left undone) has made it clear to me what I don’t want in the future. I pray a lot, trying to find that still, small voice inside me that directs me where to go next. I listen to a lot of podcasts that are centered on self-improvement, my favorites being The Robcast and On Being with Krista Tippett. I also listen to Tim Ferris, but what’s different with The Robcast is that when he endorses books, I buy them. So far I’ve gotten Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich and Honest to God by John A. T. Robinson. Both are fantastic. Rob hasn’t let me down yet. 🙂
Of course, I’m also reading for fun…. a book I got for free on BookBub called Revenge and a Bottle of Merlot. It’s about a woman who is being emotionally abused and cheated on by her husband, so she and her best friends hatch a plan to get him back for it. Considering how badly the woman is treated by her husband, the book is light, funny and a quick read.
It feels nice to laugh again. I can’t laugh all the time, but when I do, I try to make those moments last. I am trying to emerge from the dark unscathed, but having my mother die so suddenly and its aftermath is a darkness for which I was completely unprepared. I know that no one is ever ready for the death of a parent, but there was no time where she was sick, no time to get used to the idea, no time to do anything but sit in mind-altering confusion.
Though the fog is still all around me, I have at least acquired lamps.
I hope that tonight will be memorable. I hope I have a new friend. Anything more than that is just icing, and if I look at it that way, then I am not afraid of letting new people in. When I take it to the extreme of planning what it would look like to drag someone into my freak show of a life, I get overwhelmed and give up, happy to stay home with a book and some tea. I tend to get too far ahead of myself, because that’s what visionaries do. It is not altogether helpful unless I’m talking about my career, because that is limited to me.
Right now I need to vision myself doing some laundry and polishing my shoes.
Because I’m meeting someone new.
Stories That Are All True 