Up, Down and All Around.

An hour ago, this was a fabulous idea.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? That little thing about how when everything falls apart you find out who you really are. I don’t know if you really find out who you are. Maybe you just find out a little bit more about what you already had a sneaking suspicion to be true, and a little bit more about what you pretended wasn’t true.

A quick trail run in between work and home. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Here’s what I know about me:

I am tiny, but stubborn. Being a smart girl has always felt like an Achilles heel. I take on far too much and accomplish far too little of what I really want to do. I aim to please and it hurts me deeply when I don’t. I remember dates and little moments that others don’t. I want to run and play but responsibility gets in my way. I am risk averse, but I wish I took more of them. And right now?

I’m hoping that none of the dark spots around me make any sudden movements.

For the past 30 minutes … I think … I have been running in circles in the dark. Technically, I’ve been running in long, winding, rocky and cactus adorned washes in the dark. Up hills. Down hills. Around corners. In between hills. 

I think it’s been 30 minutes because I don’t actually know for sure. Because my phone is safely tucked away in my car. And I’m not really sure where the car is. Or how to get back to it.

I only know that I am surrounded by cacti lying limp by the trail like large, flaccid penises like some garish Adventure in Wonderland and somewhere out there in the dark are tarantulas, rattlesnakes, bobcats, coyotes and other nefarious creatures I do not want to meet. And that this trail … and the one before that … and the one before that … were much more appealing yesterday. 

When I knew what the hell was in front of me.

Love, Me.

The new year is barely breathing, but I still hear the gasps of the one I am so eager to put behind me. 

Certainly on a comparative scale from exceptional to excruciating, it wasn’t annus horribilis. It was difficult and unfulfilling, uneventful and vindicating. It was the end of a six-year quest for closure that did nothing to bring me to life and everything to remind me that I wasn’t living.

At least not the way I want to be.

Leave it to the season of giving (the one now packed away with the tree and its trappings) to wrap it up prettily to remind me just how little I progressed and how far I came in 365 days. And somewhere amidst the eggnog and the glitter, December delivered the final blow.

I give. And I give. And I give. And I give. And I give some more.

A deeply rooted character flaw, that.

I am, admittedly, a woman of emotions. I hurt, I laugh, I simmer, I bubble, I seethe, I am content to simply be. I am also, admittedly, afraid to be weak and let those emotions that are so innate to my woman-ness hurt me. But it’s my desire to give that frustrates me most. It’s not that I expect reciprocation of equal or consistent value. 

It’s that I forgot I matter, too.

Until I remembered that I do.