I Promise
I promise to love you in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, through the good times and the bad. That is my promise to myself. I look in the mirror, and I say it to myself. I don’t know if what I am experiencing is called a mid-life crisis, but I am in fact in the middle of my life, and I have concluded that some shit just doesn’t matter and that no matter what, I will love myself first.
How can I explain it? Being a mother meant giving up so much of myself until I honestly have no idea what I like and what I don’t. I have been trying to figure it out. The things that I left off wanting to do and loving before I was a mother were things that you want to do in your twenties. I’m damn near fifty. I don’t want to do that shit anymore. So, what do you want to do? I don’t know.
I woke up one morning feeling lost and broken. I didn’t know why I woke up like that, but as usual, I woke up thinking about writing something. When I finally made it to my office to sit down and write I was an emotional mess. What did I type? This exact sentence:
“Am I a writer? I write shit, but who reads it? What have I done with all of this writing that I have done? Am I a writer? Fuck it. I don’t know. The End.”
Ok, so the shit got real. I haven’t written anything until now. I left that on the computer, and every time I bumped the desk or turned around from the work computer to the writing computer, that is what I saw. I told myself that I had until my birthday to figure out if I’m going to be a writer or just read. I have NEVER felt like that. I tried talking to my sister and my husband about it, and they both looked at me like I was losing my mind. Maybe I did lose a little piece of my mind.
I wish that I could tell you that it is always perfect, but it’s not. Some shit is complicated. I am a straight up introvert. I would rather be alone reading a book or writing a story than doing almost anything thing else. I said almost anything else. I have never been a person that has a lot of friends. I had one true friend. I had a few people that I grew up with that I still talk to, but we are not what I consider friends. We know each other, and that’s it. I was ok with that for years. This year I decided that I wanted to be closer to some people. WRONG. I like my shit how I like my shit. People like their shit how they like their shit. Guess what? Sometimes that shit doesn’t mix. I know, it’s all shit, right? Well, you know it’s different shit depending on what you eat, and we were all on a different diet.
I don’t like to be fake. I can’t stand that shit. I don’t like to be two-faced. I don’t want to make good just to be in a person’s surroundings. Fuck it. Back to my book and my computer I went. I think that I could have done it better, but for me just cutting ties works. I don’t look back, and I don’t expect them to either. I just keep it moving. Because I have been a single pea in a pod for so long when it comes to having female friends, I am insecure or whatever people may call it. Non-trusting, skeptical, suspicious or whatever. That’s me. One thing I am not is a jealous person, but I can see how some of these other actions can be taken as that. I have never looked at a woman or what a woman had and wished that it were mine. Hell, if I like it I tell her and leave it at that.
Ok. I said all that just to say that in my search for myself, I have found two things to hold true:
1. I am a writer. 2. I am not a social person. I have always avoided crowds like the plague. I don’t enjoy taking pictures. I don’t enjoy huge functions; thus why I have never been to the circus, and I only go to select venues for concerts no matter how badly I want to see the show. I don’t go to clubs or funerals. I tried.
So, now I am figuring out who the forty-seven-year-old me is. What I know for sure is:
I love Pinot Noir I love to write I love to read I love warm weather I love myself no matter where I am with health or wealth.
I am self-publishing my book. I am no longer afraid of what the world will think. It’s scary because I’m no longer scared, no longer concerned about what the world will or won’t do.
The Writer
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