2018, the year that I named my year of being brave, ended up being pretty much exactly that. From actual bravery in flipping around on a trapeze bar to opening myself up to possible rejection and hurt, I think I managed it as well as one could expect from a rather anxiety ridden, awkward girl who is deathly afraid of, you know, rejection and hurt.
Mostly 2018 will be remembered as the year that I finally felt like I was doing more than just treading water and trying to keep it all together. My time, mostly, is spent on things that I truly enjoy-and learning to enjoy the mundane has been a wonderful experience. I am most grateful for my family, who graciously provide a vacation for the girls and me (and a million other things that would take reams of paper to name), and for all of the fun that the girls and I have had in the past year, from ziplining to our movie nights to all the musicals. My life is blessed. I say that word a lot, probably to the point of being annoying, but I know of no other word to encompass how completely lucky I feel to have been not only born into the family that I have, but to have been given the opportunity to raise these two precious girls who are just the most fun people I’ve ever gotten to spend all of my time with.
In 2015 my life shattered-and that is the only word for it, in 2015 my world shattered and nothing could undo it, nothing could be done about the fact that I was forever and always going to be a different person going forward.
I don’t mean to belabor it but I never for one moment believed that I would love my new life more than my old life. After all, this new Joy had faced the ultimate rejection-and, as I’ve said in past posts, I sort of hated her for it. Anyway, just to say-I never expected to love this life, this single mom life, this working mom life-I never expected that I would love it more than that stay-at-home mom life, that life where I had a partner who loved me. I never, never, never thought that I would think that I prefer this sometimes lonely existence over that life where for a very long time I felt loved and cherished.
But what I realized in 2018 is that I totally like this life, this mom, this woman that I am now, so much more than the person that for fifteen years thought that she had it all.
I promised myself, entering into 2016, that by 2019 I would have most of this figured out.
That isn’t going to happen.
Because I have learned how to be alone. How to take care of things by myself. How to budget and parent a teenager and straighten my hair and all the million things that I’m always writing about.
What I’m still struggling with is imagining my life beyond these things-beyond being Betsy and Felicity’s mom, and Dave and Dina’s daughter, and thinking that maybe, possibly, there is some bigger plan in action here.
And so my word for 2019 is going to be trust.
I’m going to trust in myself, trust in my heart and my gut and all of those bits of me that let me down so terribly three years ago. I’m going to trust in the idea that there is a great wide world out there, waiting so patiently for my tiny little snail like steps to get us there.
We’ll see, 2019. I’m going to try my best, and probably fail a lot, and hopefully make sense of all the pieces that still seem to not fit together just as they should.
In the end, there are parts of the past few years that will never truly make sense, and I know that. But mostly, mostly, the person that I am staring at a whole new decade-she is who I want to be.
All the best is yet to come.
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All the best things of 2018:
(According, of course, to Joy)
Movies: Mary Poppins Returns; A Star is Born; Won’t You Be My Neighbor?; A Quiet Place; Incredibles 2; Ralph Breaks the Internet
Books: Paperback Crush; The Immortialists; The Ensemble; Bachelor Nation; Hey Ladies; Us Against You; You Think It, I’ll Say It; Sea Witch
Musicals and Plays: Hamilton, Rent, The Humans, Les Misérables
Podcasts:
Daily and/or Weekly
The Daily; Up First; The Lazy Genius; Pantsuit Politics; What Should I Read Next?; The Popcast; From the Front Porch; On Being; The One You Feed; Diane Rehm On My Mind; The Bible Binge
Series
The Dream, Heaven’s Gate
Episodes
SSR-The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High episodes
Typology-Lisa Whelchel
The Cut-Beat Around the Bush
Simple-The Liturgical Calendar
Literary Disco-Cat Person
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