"I'm blessed."

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I'm turning 29 years old. Twenty nine. The number that comes right before thirty. I spent a couple years living in the midwest of the US. When you ask someone how she's doing today in Missouri she'll reply, "I'm blessed." Today I have to say, there is no more accurate a description for my current state.

It's funny. When I got home from my mission and immediately threw myself headlong into The Mr. (who was leaving for his mission in 30 days and counting) I was 23 years old. I spent two years waiting for him, three months dating/engaged to him, two years married to him, one year grieving him, and now... I'm here. I applied to this campus fresh out of high school. There was nothing discernibly wrong with my application, but they firmly bid me good day, even after petitioning my rejection letter. Not to be deterred I applied again at the age of 20, and was likewise rejected. This third application to get my education in an isolated, paradise, safe haven was the the dialysis treatment that allowed new hope to start pumping through my crusty old cat loving, divorced lady veins. When I got my acceptance letter I literally, immediately dropped to my knees and cried and sobbed and gushed out thanks to my benevolent God for my chance to start this new life.

When people here guess how old I am, I find it an interesting coincidence that they almost always guess 23 years old. It's like I've been transported to another universe where I applied to Hawaii instead of Provo when I came home from my mission and the whole thing with The Mr. never even happened.

But unfortunately, it did happen, and sometimes I get really stuck in the sadness of it all, the wrongness, the injustice, the tragedy. I find myself re-impailing myself over the same broken, distorted memories again and again: trying to discern where it started to go wrong, wondering if there were things going on I missed, recalling the way his voice sounded when he called me to say, "I don't love you anymore," wondering how I could have ever been so stupid.  This is a terrible habit that I do not recommend and lately I've gotten almost overwhelmingly fed up with the deep mental groove this pattern has worn in my synapses and psyche, and I've been making my most conscientious efforts to change it. Today I experienced some success.

I've mentioned this before, but it's in one of the first posts here, which was almost a year ago now, so I feel like I'm justified in revisiting the concept. It's something I need to be reminded of again and again. Sometimes we get so caught up in the wrongness of what happened. I find I can almost feel guilty or inauthentic being okay, healing, moving on, even being glad or grateful for it. Today was a beautiful reminder that it's okay to be okay. As I walked to class today instead of fretting about my long dead love life with The Mr. and how I might have saved it if I had only…I thought about how he was strongly opposed to me going back to school to finish my bachelors degree. I thought about all the times  he was completely emotionally disconnected when we had sex and how empty I felt after. I thought about the time I got pregnant, how I was going to tell him I was expecting, but before I could he sat me down and told me he was almost at the end of his rope in our relationship. I thought about how the stress, panic and anxiety I felt during that pregnancy was so palpable it may as well have been a bowling ball, unexpectedly careening around my world. I remembered the cruel way he responded to me in my desperate loneliness and depression during my miscarriage, and then I thought about how that baby would be just over one year old now, and how different my life would be if she were.

After all that I thought: Thank God. Thank God I went through a divorce. Thank God I don't have that kind of life irrevocably laid out before me. Thank God I get a second chance. 

I am 29 years old in one day and counting and I get to spend hours a day with charcoal and clay, learning chants in Hawaiian and planning trips to leave the country, learn languages, build businesses and dream as big and as free or as small and as me as I want. I am the luckiest girl. The luckiest, and it's okay for me to feel it. It's okay for me to let it be.

Life Goes On

Photo attribution here.

So, whoa.

Imagine a whirlwind, a tropical whirlwind that smells like plumeria and glows with never ending sunshine that heals everything that it touches. This magical whirlwind came to the San Diego airport, picked me up and lovingly set me down in the most heavenly, beautiful, perfect, healing place imaginable for me. It quickly rearranged everything in my life and then laid me down in a bed, in a dorm, on a campus in Hawaii. I now live half a mile from the ocean in a land where there is one main road that circumnavigates the entire island in a meandering, swooping motion along the beach, with a speed limit of 35mph. There is a breeze that constantly rustles the leaves of palm trees and I am serenaded by tropical birds everywhere I go. The student body is the most culturally diverse in the whole of the United States. My days are filled with art classes. My afternoons are spent working and studying--during which time, I am still in a tropical paradise. I make new friends and learn new things every day, and there's a gentleman we'll call Captain Amazing that I met the day before classes started. The first time he kissed me, there was a rainbow around the moon. Rainbow. Around. The moon. 

Life, my friends, is beautiful. 

Also, The Mr. is engaged. 

I suppose it's serendipitous (or perhaps a little more divinely orchestrated) that I should be in such a lovely place in my life when I found out this news. In fact, I was on a date with Captain Amazing who happens to be a Bio Psychology major and an advocate for the power of training the mind not to focus on things that will only hurt you. "That's so crazy! It's okay though. You'll be fine." Was all I got from him. 

When I balked at that and said, "Don't you think this is a big deal? I mean, it's totally nuts!"

He said, " I don't want you to be hurt. Thinking about it will only hurt you. Let's talk about tonight." 

And that was that. 

So, a brief recap of lessons learned from my six week hiatus from this blog:

1. Don't ever give up the search for your happy place. There is balance and beauty in the world that is yours for the cultivating. 

2. Sometimes when you think it's really, really, really important to wait one full year after your divorce to date anyone a handsome philanthropist comes along and changes your mind, and that's okay. 

3. There is no telling what your ex will do, and some of it will likely piss you off or make you crazy, there's nothing we can do about that. We most certainly can, however, choose how we respond. Choosing to cultivate healthy thought patterns and avoid rumination is a good choice. 

Upcoming posts will undoubtedly cover the blissful, terrifying madness that is trying to find the balance between protecting oneself and allowing oneself to be loved post traumatizing divorce, and more details about dealing with an ex getting remarried in all its glory. 

For today, happy sabbath, and aloha. 

I like banjos.

Photo attribution here.

Something magic started happening recently. I was sitting around by myself one day, as I most often am, thinking, as is always the case. A happiness monster was sitting in my heart, chewing her happiness gum. She slowly blew a big fat bubble of joy and it rose up in front of me, getting bigger and bigger until it stood in front of me, equally as tall and twice as wide as me. The bubble of joy then burst and covered me entirely in a sort of a sticky bliss, as sweet as pie and twice as enjoyable.

That's the best I've got for describing what life's been like lately. Highlights from today so far: 

Sleeping in (that would be enough, but the list goes on!)

Some yoga and meditation in the morning and a breakfast of homemade carrot ginger juice.

A trip to the farmer's market where I purchased myself fava beans, sugar snap peas, a small bunch of asparagus, the most sumptuous salmon you will ever lay eyes on and a gorgeous bouquet of flowers, just for me, not to mention the most adorable jar of honey for my boss's birthday on Monday.

A trip to Target where a very cute employee (bearded, of course) offered to help me discern the price of my new adorable Important Things folder I've purchased in preparation for my move to Hawaii.

A delicious lunch of asparagus grilled with apples, pine nut couscous, water with mint leaves and the salmon from the market. It was every bit as delicious as anticipated. 

(This one is part of the meal, but was so freaking delicious that it gets its own bullet point.) Banana chocolate swirl Talenti gelato for dessert. I am pretty sure that half pint I just consumed was better than most of the sex I've had. All this to a backdrop of William Elliott Whitmore and various musicians provided by Pandora, all quite adept with a banjo and/or harmonica. I may or may not have done a hillbilly, knee kicking dance while I was grilling my apples and asparagus.

This is kind of a new thing for me-- being able to enjoy myself. At least it was submerged for quite some time in my recent past. The way it all started was that I began letting myself dream again. 

At first I just had this assumption that The Mr. and I would have the same dreams. A few love drunk conversations we'd had while cuddled up and cozy between kisses before he left on his mission had sprouted within me the idea that we wanted the same things. Part of The Mr.'s charm is his odd and fragmented way of speaking, especially in his letters. While they were chalk full of phrases like, "You are the apple of my eye and the reason some people think I'm asthmatic," they were essentially void of much that I could build on. So, being the romantic, creative, hopeful, optimistic girl I am, I started building ideas and expectations all on my own. I'm a dreamer, a planner, a romantic and an adventurer. Somewhere along the line between, "I met this cute bearded guy," and, "He says he doesn't want to be married anymore," I came to the heartbreaking realization that absolutely none of what we wanted out of life was the same. My attempt at resolving this during those years sandwiched between the aforementioned statements was to start tossing cargo out of the sinking ship. I didn't really need  to travel, did I? Maybe it was okay for me to get pregnant before I was done with school. Who really needs a bachelors degree? Or a husband who understands her sense of style, her jokes or her intense devotion to all things retro?

I often use the term, "ghost of myself," when I describe me at that time. It's the most accurate description I've got. Now, there's got to be some level of compromise in marriage. Two separate beings becoming one is a process, to be sure...but how far is too far?

Today the pendulum has swung as far back into Frowfrow Land as it can possibly go, and I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. Somewhere between today and the moments I experienced in September of 2012 there is a happy medium that I hope to find again someday, but today I want to say this. I believe it is the nature of certain individuals to give too much. It's a hard thing to be in these shoes, because we live in a religious culture that champions charity, sacrifice, service, selflessness, submission, obedience and devotion. I believe in cultivating these virtues, but today I need to say, God wants us to stand up for ourselves as well. He wants us to be treated well. He wants us to be healthy. He wants us to be kind and loving and helpful, and He wants us to be unrelenting in our stance that we are worth it too. What we want, need, love, learn and laugh at is just as important as the next guy. We don't have to be second citizens to be in God's good graces. There is a balance there, and God wants us to find it. Too far to the selfish side is no worse than too far to the giving side. God wants His babies souls intact.