It’s hard to believe, but I’ve made over 100 posts!  I started this just under a year ago and I am definitely a changed person in that time.  But what happens when you change and no one else does?  It creates a rift.  Sometimes that rift can be mended with friends and actually end up enhancing and strengthening the relationship.  Other times, depending on the relationship, the rift will just grow and grow.  You can act like everything is fine, but you know it isn’t.  You know that there are tough decisions to make and that sometime the best thing to do for someone you care about is to let them hit rock bottom.  I hate saying that.  It sounds cruel and goes against everything I believe about supporting your people.

In this day and age, with the limitless technology at our fingertips, there is no reason any person cannot achieve their dreams other than sheer and utter laziness.  The laziness might not be someone’s fault, there could be underlying issues such as depression and anxiety.  In fact depression and anxiety are running rampant nowadays, but there is not enough of a rise of people who actually DO something about it.  I get that.  Therapy is hard.  Stepping back and taking a good look at yourself is one of the hardest things to view.   But taking that first step, even with a service such as TalkSpace where you aren’t conversing face to face in a doctor’s office, that first step sucks.  I can speak with authority on this because I’ve been there.  Many times.  It’s not like one day you wake up and you’re not depressed, it’s something  you have to work on every day.  You have to look for the silver lining.  You have to be grateful for the little moments. You have to remember that there is a MUCH BIGGER picture and that our lives are tiny in the grand scheme of things.  Not everything that happens to you has to “HAPPEN TO YOU”, it can sometimes just be an experience you went through that turned out to be shitty, but one foot in front of the other and before you know it, you are on a new path.

My grandmother is a stunning example of this.  She passed away a couple weeks ago. When I heard she was in hospice I booked a flight for the next day and was lucky enough to get there before she passed.  I didn’t get to talk to her, she was sleeping the whole time,  but I like to think that she knew I was there.   I know that for me,  being there changed my grieving process because I don’t have regrets.   I didn’t always like her, but she was an important part of my upbringing in so many ways.  One of the most important things she taught me was that I don’t want to spend my life as a miserable cunt when I have a big huge family full of love.  Instead she was a petty woman who would never do something just to be nice, she would do something if she benefited from it.  She treated my mother and aunts like shit.  As a child it was confusing, to see her treat them so badly, because she was different with me.  I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents, both sets, when I was growing up.  When I would spend weekends with her and my grandfather I knew that I had to behave, like SERIOUSLY behave, and  she’d do things like teach me different arts and crafts.  She taught me cross-stitch, which is a skill I still use today.  She made sure that my grammar and manners were always on point.  After my grandfather passed I sent her a note, not for a reason, I just used to write her every other month, and I got my ass reamed for not addressing the letter to Mrs.BW Cochran, but just Martha Cochran.  She said the fact that my grandfather wasn’t with us didn’t change the fact that she was his wife and expected to be addressed as such.  Manners are what separate the classy people.  As she got older and ornerier, I didn’t see her as much, but when I did make a point to see her on trips home I was rewarded with rants about how the mexicans are taking over the country(and this was back in like 05 when that wasn’t on the daily news).  She lived in the house she shared with my grandfather until the end.   As much as it was worrisome for her to live alone,  now that I’m older–I get it.  She wanted to live in her house until the end and she did, and I do admire that ZFG attitude that she had regarding her living situation.  Really though, I think it would have broken her heart to get rid of any of her “stuff”.  She was very much a hoarder because that’s what happens to people when they don’t have love in their life–stuff becomes their love, and boy did she love a lot of stuff.  Every time I visited her I would spend the next few weeks purging half of the shit in my apartment because I didn’t want to end up like her.

Yes, as you can imagine there are many many different kinds of feels regarding her passing.  I think about her life, living alone for the last 17 yrs, never traveling, never going anywhere or really doing anything other than needlepoint.  It makes me sad.  I wonder if she ever thought about a different life, about doing the unexpected, upsetting the status quo.  Or maybe that was the life she dreamed about.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that 2018 was challenging in so many ways, but all of those challenges are helping to create a 2019 that will be…..you guessed it–amazeballs.