I was looking forward to this new year – another new beginning. This one promises to be much better than those I have weathered the past decade – not a false hope sort of expectation but a grounded, reasoned basis for hope. But things have gotten off to a rocky start. The end of the year and first week of 2009 have been unbearably dreary weather – warm, gray, first cold then warm then cold again, a foggy drizzle that breaks into drenching thunderstorms day after day after day. Finally, yesterday I slipped into the darkness. Not a surprise but a disappointment.
Then – today, as I was picking myself up from the abyss I was hit first from one direction by a rejection that in months will be completely forgotten and then another. This one will remain with me to the ends of my days. I’m tired, bone weary from being hit hard from behind without warning, tired to the bone of picking myself up to be knocked to the ground yet again.
But now I have a choice. I can choose to give in to the pain and take the emotional roller coaster. It calls me. It is a wild ride – not pleasant but beckoning still. More pleasant in its ending than in its twists and turns and climbs and drops. More of an addicts draw to the ups and downs than a true pleasure. So I can choose that ride OR I can take the newly available option – the one that removes me from the vicissitudes, the one that is calm and peaceful.
I am in such pain and so angry from what has happened and yet I am extraordinarily aware of the choice before me. Take the ride of emotion and rail and rage or let it go over and over, choose to leave this behind and take the new, high road. Pick the option that offers promise and hope and shake the dirt from my sandals when I leave the other behind.
All my life, I have clung to the old, trying over and over to make it right – all for naught, all for waste of time, of hope, of love, of life. Trying to make right out of what could never by right. That was the hopes of having a hate filled family love me. Today I can choose to live that legacy or cut it loose and leave the rottenness behind and move on.
The way I have written makes the choice sound easy. It should be. The gift of writing is that it makes it ever clearer. My habit pulls me towards that crazy rollercoaster of emotion but today I say, “No.” Ever difficult in spite of the obviousness – as hard to let go as a drink is to an alcoholic – today I am letting the lost hope of what “should” be go, leaving it behind for what can be. What ever it is that I am opting for cannot be worse than what I am finally letting go.
The pain is huge but I choose to let go of it as well. Goodbye to the loss and brokenness and pain of being rejected and shut out and talked about behind my back. Those are still parts of my life but I am letting go of longing for it to be different. It is what it is and I must move on.