Progress

December 23, 2022

These past six months have given me a lot of insight into me, my life, my “circumstance”. I realize I’m not the only person in the world to have lost someone who’d been in their lives for as long as they were. But I am the only one who is living my life and feeling my feelings so, bear with me please.

When my journey began as a widow, a friend gave me a journal one day, right before we sat down for a lunch date with a couple other friends. It is a beautiful hardback journal with a cover colored in gold and simply, but aptly labeled “Thoughts”. I held it for a while after receiving it and stared at it a while, too, before I actually began writing in it.

I’ve since written many things in it; quotes from other people and lyrics from songs, doodles here and there and of course, there are also my own words and random fleeting thoughts, too. Some of it is just word salad, a group of words that for some may not make any sense, but for me, right then and there when I scribbled them down, the words meant everything. They still do.

One of the more recent topics I jotted down was on being okay. So, here we go.  

A friend of mine told me a while back that eventually, I would be okay. That time would be the healer. That time would also be the thing that would feel like forever and never seem to reveal the other side of the mountain. At that point in this journey, I doubted I’d ever feel okay again.

Yet here I am. I did get to the top of a proverbial hill the other day and saw the scenery around me and realized, I am okay. I AM okay. More quietly? I? I am okay. And I don’t know quite yet how to feel about that.

I didn’t stop living. This is my new chapter. I am learning what I like, I am learning what I don’t like and sometimes I feel guilty at this new-found realization of being okay; of being alive and seeking continued growth. That,  I’m sure, is common. But yet, I do feel at times I should quell those thoughts of feeling good, of feeling okay.

I know, weird, but hey, this is ME after all.

Approaching the holidays quickly now, just days away, I’m not feeling as “bad” as I thought I’d feel.

That is an odd sensation. Maybe this is the acceptance part of the stages one goes through when life tosses a grenade their way. It’s the Oh okay, here we are, this is the new you. You can accept it, you can deny it, you can scrunch it up in a ball and try to throw it away, but this is now your life.

I’ve chosen to live it and see where it takes me and yes, I do feel okay.

I am sure that I will continue to feel the ebb and flow of life; the ups and downs of hills as they come my way, but right now? I am okay.