Chop, Chop — A Post About Cutting Ties

My mom has always said that it was in her 30’s that she really started figuring out what she would and wouldn’t tolerate in life, and who she would let in her life and who she wouldn’t.  My 35th birthday was August 11th, and I have been thinking about those things.

I have been thinking about family members, about casual acquaintances, about the people I surround myself with.  I have been thinking hard on all of this, and I can see clearly that, sometimes, I have given a person many more “chances” than they deserve.

I wouldn’t say my romantic relationship, that with LarBear, is totally perfect, but it is pretty freaking amazing and wonderful and altogether positive.  Almost two years now, we have really started to figure each other out, can anticipate each others’ needs and wants, we know each other well.  We know how to cheer each other up and what to do when things get rough.  I am completely satisfied with this relationship, and I fully believe that it will continue long into the future, as long as we stay true to who we really are, which we do on a day-to-day basis.  I can say with full confidence that LarBear is “the one,” and there is no doubt in his mind about it, either.

So, having the romantic relationship thing finally figured out, that leaves me with bunches of other relationships that need tending, need mending, and, it has finally struck me, that need ending.  I have tended and mended a few here recently, and today, was struck by a ton of bricks about how I REALLY feel about a person who has been a key figure in my past.

I’m not trying to play armchair psychiatrist, but this person is a classic narcissist.  And he has been, my entire life — I have just been blinded to it.  I don’t want to trash-talk this person, but he doesn’t read this blog and he isn’t a very big player in my life anymore, and now, I’m deciding, he will play an even lesser role.  I am not going to let my ex-step-father (is that a word?) rule over me with his manipulative tactics any longer.

Without going into detail, I (and my mom, and my sister, and everyone he comes into contact with) have long suffered from his toxic character, and now it is going to stop.  I am also going to cease contact with his side of the family, because, with the exception of a very small handful of people, they are just as, if not more, toxic, than he is.

 

 

 

 

I Want, I Can, I Will

It’s probably not the most difficult chapter of my life, but maybe just one of the MORE difficult ones that I seem to have repeated six or seven or maybe eleven times within the course of my short 34 years on this planet.  It’s the sense of extreme deja vu, the certainty that the piano in the corner has played this music before, although perhaps in a different key, a slightly different tempo.

Yes, it’s time to work on the recovery stage of a big, huge, fat, ugly depression, and to be starting to see the crest at the top of the hill.  It is within the next fifty yards or so, that I have started “doing things” again.  When I say, “doing things,” I mean everything from showering daily to leaving my house regularly to baking apple pies from scratch to exercising.  There are THINGS and they are getting DONE.  By ME.

A few days ago, I fell coming up the steps of my house and turned my ankle.  I was pretty sure something was broken, and I was somewhat positive that I had re-broken the metatarsal in my foot that I had also broken the last two Decembers.  My mood turned foul as I hobbled and waited to go see the doctor and have an x-ray.

As it turns out, nothing is broken.  While I was at the doctor’s office, I also managed to ask for a dietician referral and a prescription for compression stockings.  You see, I have let myself get a big fat.  A lot fat.  Ridiculously-bigger-than-ever fat.  Fat enough, that it is affecting my health.  My doctor almost put me on diabetes treatment medication, but I wouldn’t let her and asked her to re-do my labs — which came back within normal limits.

So, for the sixth, seventh, eleventh time in my life, I have had my “oh holy crap, I’m too fat to keep going in this way” freak-out.  I am going to, first thing tomorrow, go see about some compression stockings because my lower legs, feet, and ankles are swollen so terribly uncomfortably.  I’m going to research a dietician, who maybe can help me with some meal-planning.  I’m also going to get back to my aqua exercise at the YMCA, because that was really helping last week.

Life is too good, too sweet, too soon gone to spend my time being:

1. So overweight that almost any movement is prohibitively uncomfortable
2. So self-conscious about my high weight that I avoid eating or grocery shopping in front of other people
3. So heavy that all I can think about is how heavy, slow, syrupy my body feels
4. Ashamed (yet baffled) that I have let myself get so big
5. So unhealthy that I need medication to treat any weight-related disease

SO friends, I might do something nutty, something drastic — I might swear off sugar or swear off carbohydrates or start making my goal of exercising every day.  Whatever it takes, I’m gonna do it.  Because, friends, I have TOO FREAKING AWESOME of a life to be without one, all over some fat cells and high blood sugars.