who

Who am I?

I'm just beginning to learn the answer to this question.

What I can tell you so far is that I'm

stubborn
afraid
tough as nails
lonely
friendly
intelligent
salacious
creative
impulsive
bold
determined
funny
prone to depression
optimistic

My story, in a large nutshell is that my whole life I have been obedient. As a child, I would spin tales of my wishes and dreams to my mom, and she would cut me off with her own opinion based on her experience and her reality. I would take that as the way things are and cancel my wishes and dreams to fit her mold of how I imagined she wanted me to be.

For the past 23 years, I have been married to the same person. We'll call him D. At the time, he and I had very differing interests, and one by one, I shut down my own hobbies and interests because they did not appeal to him. My life with him was focused on being who I thought he wanted  me to be.

I became an expert chameleon. I had no sense of self, and I didn't like myself very much.

Fast forward to three years ago. In the interest of remaining as anonymous as possible, I'll just say that in the period of about 18 months our family experienced a handful of crises, back to back to back.* Things started to calm down two years ago and one morning I woke up and something was different. I was different. It was like the old me took off during the night and a new me took over when the alarm went off in the morning.

I liked myself. My self esteem was... present. I didn't need to worry about what anyone else thought about me because that's their problem. I actually living the way I wanted to and not in a homogenized chameleon-like way so as the please everyone at home.

My relationships are changing.

They had long been in the habit of me being the "yes girl" that for me to be true to myself, I have learned how to start saying "no," or at least saying, "we'll see." That's unsettling for everyone involved, including me. It's new.

I call my mom out on her shit. At one point, during a phone call, I recognized that her old habits with me are toxic, so I hung up on her. I didn't speak with her for 6 months.

At home, D is no longer sure what to think of me. A long examination of this relationship has revealed to me that it is time for me to move on, post haste. I recently read that a relationship formed while one person has low self esteem will support the dynamic of that person's low self esteem. That's so true for us.

Now that I like myself, and my self esteem is healthier that it ever has been, the relationship can't support the old dynamic, and the pieces don't fit together any more.

As for regaining (heck, gaining) my sense of self, I'm working on that. One crisis we lived through was a loss of income that we have not regained. All my self exploration has been done on a shoestring budget, but I have learned enough to know that I love love LOVE the new me, and I'm never going back to chameleon-girl every again.

This change is what I refer to as "Waking Up," since I feel like I have finally opened my eyes to my own life. And it seriously feels like it happened overnight.

Making all the necessary changes to my life to reflect the new me is what I refer to as "Getting out of bed."

This is where I'm starting from as I begin this blog, April 2014.
I have so many thoughts about all of this swirling around in my head that I started this blog to keep track of it all, categorize things, and figure out what's next for me.


*On the Holmes & Rahe Stress Scale, I checked off 18 boxes and scored a whopping 615.
According to this scale, a score of 300+ puts me at "high or very high risk of becoming ill in the near future." No shit, sherlock. I got sick about 6 months into the crises and am still recovering.