Fact of my life: I had more fun and more laughter, and more ear-to-ear smiling in the last six months of 2012, which were the first six months of knowing a man I fondly started calling “the drummer boy,” than I had had in the 26 years of adulting, prior to meeting him. No matter what happened later, or during or since that first six months of knowing him, this is a fact that I could not deny when faced with a heavy decision that I couldn’t take lightly during the last few months…to give up and turn away or to press on and try again…When your life skids out of control, like it hits a patch of black ice and you horrifyingly spin-out, and you are not shy to share that your life had become totally and painfully unmanageable, it’s not always easy to get realigned and back on your path with grace or dignity of any sort…there are people who know your life was wonky for months and people who know how hard you cried and how sad, scared, and sullen you were for many weeks…so I can’t just wave my wand like Hermione, or do that nose wiggle like Samantha, or fling my high ponytail like Jeannie and make it all go away.

WHAT I can do is live fully today with how things are today. I can move forward with my head held high and know in my heart I have done the right things, taken the right course of action as a good and compassionate human, and know that for me, for this moment in my life, I am perfectly imperfect and okay with that. If my choices and decisions turn out to be wrong, then that is another lesson for me to learn in the future, and if my choices and decisions are right, then I am glad for them and glad that I followed my gut and did not let the opinions of others, or difficult circumstances during a difficult period of several weeks, sway me too far from my empathetic and compassionate and loving soul.

When you have gone through a difficulty or tragedy or sadness, or an event that is all of those things, it is rather easy to dwell on the bad parts and linger there, but it is not a good place to be, a cesspool of resentment and rage really, who wants to stay in THAT??!! Not me. When your brain is in a kerfuffle and you are struggling with choices to make and actions to take, thinking about all of the good times and how they outweigh the bad times is an effective tool for decision making, at least for me. When you are sad you can easily allow yourself to hold onto and linger with the sadness but then the good times memories get quashed and squished and are harder to access…best to file away the sad and refocus on the glad, in my experience anyway!

There are so many GOOD MEMORIES in my mind that are so much better, and so full of love and laughter from so many GOOD TIMES that they easily outnumber the bad feelings that are still quietly lingering in the background of my brain from a recent bad chapter in this, in general and overall, pretty great story… It is the right thing, for me, to move on with an open heart and an open mind, and to be honest, set and follow some new boundaries and some new “rules” for myself and how I interact with others, and how I care for myself, but to be clear it’s the right thing for me to move on with a positive mindset to create more good times and make more good memories, putting the bad feelings to bed in a way, really inducing a coma for them if I’m being totally honest…just be gone!! with a wave of a wand, a wrinkle of a nose, and a fling of ponytail…POOF!!

We, this drummer boy and I, are certainly are not the first couple, and won’t be the last, to go through a very bad event or series of unfortunate events and decide to try to repair what is damaged and strengthen what is still good, like that great lyric from PINK, we’re not broken just bent…we are certainly not the only couple who are two pretty good people who went through a pretty bad time…we are certainly not the first couple to have to have some difficult conversations to find our common ground again in order to move on…and we are certainly not the first couple to have to have a heart to heart HE-Said-SHE-Said about things that caused raised voices and were argued about.

I’ve lived long enough to know, whether people share their personal lives and personal business out in the open, or if they keep things totally locked and private and to themselves, “in house” so to speak, that more goes on behind most closed doors than anybody wants to admit…I just keep my door open I guess. All the good times you might see other couples having posted on social media, your neighbors or your friends going out and having fun, or famous people you read about in google news, are not always what they seem…sometimes good times are illusions that tell a tale and not a truth.

I suppose I want to be comfortable with the ugly parts of adulting and the sad parts of growing as a person, or the difficulties that often arise if you stay alive long enough…I am ending this year with a wide open heart for all of the good that comes to your soul with welcoming in a new year. I am totally comfortable with envisioning myself years from now, laughing, but rather horrified, at what a crap of a year 2021 was, and being bright eyed with how delighted I am, my future self that is, that 2022 and on was so much better, and so filled with good times, and filled with more memories made of more fun and laughter…the good times are there for the living and the taking and the doing. I shuffled my brain, reorganized my files so to speak, to make some room for more merry memory making!