Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Heart

I have spent the last week stuck in my head.  Maybe not the whole past week.  But a very significant portion of the past week  I have spent over thinking everything.

I guess that's what I do. Over think things.  I get told all of the time not to think about it so much.   I know that there are certain things that I do better if I quit thinking about them.  Playing pool comes immediately to mind.  If I have a drink or two I stop thinking and analyzing what I am doing so much and then I do it better. I write papers better when I don't think about it too much.  I also express my feelings better when I quit thinking so hard about what and how to I need to say what I need to say.  See, even that sentence is an example of over thinking.  I guess that's why I have always said that I wished I could live life like I'm three beers in.  That is when I stop thinking about things and just act and say.  Not in a reckless way, just in a less uptight way.

Over thinking wouldn't be so horrible if it didn't always make things so much worse than they actually are. To over analyze a situation is to worry about it.  Worrying leads to sleepless nights and shoulders that hurt so bad you can't move your arm and it hurts to breathe. It isn't a bad thing that I can see all sides of any situation.  It isn't bad that I am able to weigh the benefits and negatives before acting. That is one of the best things about being a Libra, balance. That's also the downside. When you can't stop thinking you start to project all of your fears and worries into your every day life.  They don't stay in your head.  They leak out into conversations and actions.  You start to see negative and bad things everywhere.  The mind is a powerful thing, and not someplace that is fun to get stuck.

Unfortunately, the over thinking is a trait that I have passed on to my child.  His 10 year old friend told him that he needed to stop over thinking the other day.  How horrible.  I have some pretty good traits.  How is it that I managed to pass on my over thinking and worrying onto my child.  I guess that's what happens when you only have one kid.  They end up with all the personality traits that you might have divided up between siblings.

So, I guess now that I can acknowledge that I've been stuck in my head and over thinking life in general I can try and change my thinking.  I know that I have been crabby and shitty.  I know that it's because I'm over thinking and analyzing every action, word and thought. I'm not being the positive, happy person that I should be.  I need to start thinking happy.  Heck I should be super happy all day every day.  Although I don't have to stress about work anymore (and I couldn't be happier about removing that stressor) that doesn't mean that I'm not stressed about a whole slew of other things.  Even with that being the case I need to adjust my attitude.  Think happy, be happy.  I said it before and I'll say it again, the mind is a powerful thing.  The least I could do it let it do it's thing in a good way.  

Love is an Unconditional Commitment to an Imperfect Person

I've been thinking a lot lately about why we end up with certain people. It started earlier this week when Veronica wrote a blog about accepting and loving the imperfections in other people and culminated  today while reading this blog about not marrying the love of your life (beware it's a tear jerker, or maybe I'm just super sensitive).

 Daily I am amazed that I managed to end up with the love of my life, and daily I am still afraid that I am going to do something to mess it up .  I didn't marry the love of my life, twice. And based on our history I truly didn't believe that I ever would.  Not to discount the people I did end up marrying.  I was in love with them at the time that I made the decision.  But there was always something missing.  I was usually able to forget about the missing piece but then something would happen.  I would see Josh on Facebook or he would come to visit and everything that was missing was shoved in my face and made evident.

One of the great things about our relationship now, versus when we were teenagers, is that we have so much history together, and apart, that we know exactly what the others imperfections are.  I hear more and more often of couples who didn't start off with each other as adults but ended up with each other in the end.  When you meet someone as a child or teenager, and then you watch them grow as an adult, you see them for who they really are.  Especially when you haven't made your mistakes together, you have still watched the other person make those mistakes.  You know what their weaknesses are and what there downfalls are long before you choose to be in a relationship again.  You have watched them grow without the rose colored glasses, because for years you weren't looking at them as the other half of you.  You were looking at them as individual with their own life and their own problems.  The years between remove the rose colored glasses and let them just be a person.  Even if you know deep down they are who you were meant to be with.

I spent a lot of our years apart worrying that we were going to end up like the couple in the second blog, knowing that we were supposed to be together but never quite being able to make it happen.  I knew the years that Josh was in Iraq that there was a possibility that I was going to get the call from my mom saying that something horrible had happened.  Which is probably a lot of the reason that I did get married twice, and spent a lot of my mid-twenties convincing myself that he wasn't the one who got away.  It was too scary and too much for me to handle.  The "what-if's" drove me nuts, do I just lived in the happy little world of denial.

Lucky for me the stars aligned and Josh, being who he is, shoved the reality of what he had both been forcing ourselves to live without right in my face.  Forcing me to make changes,  The awesome thing was, that he didn't expect the changes that I was making to include him. It just worked out that way because it was supposed to.  I lucked out.  The horrible didn't have to happen, we didn't have to spend the rest of our lives without each other.  We wised up and realized that we needed to figure out how to be together, and the challenges that we had avoided in the past could be damned.

Commitment is such a weird thing.  Almost as weird as falling in love with the person you were meant to be with at the age of thirteen.Choosing to commit again after failing multiple times. Choosing not be the bitter divorcee who will never commit or get married again, isn't east to overcome. Choosing to spend the rest of your life with someone, to give someone your every day and your every night is hard.  Promising that you are going to support them, whether you agree with their decisions or not, is something you don't take lightly.  Let me tell you though, when you know that you are going into a relationship without the rose colored glasses, when you can recognize the hard reality that is personalities and compromise and weaknesses and faults, that's where you find the real commitment.  That is where you know that things are going to work out for the best.  There is no honeymoon stage, if there was it was almost 20 years ago.  Relationships like this one are based on experience and reality.  And that is why they work.

You can keep the Maserati. I'll stick with the Toyota.

A few months ago (alright almost a year) I wrote a blog about how it's better to cry in a Maserati than in a Toyota. What a difference a year makes.  As those of you who follow my blog know, I have spent the last eight months in a job that I hate. Hate might be a tame work to what that job was.  It was a pit of negativity and stress.  It was everything that I have never wanted. There was nothing fulfilling about it.  I literally didn't like anything about my job except my staff, and there were even a few of them that I didn't like.  

It seems that I can't go through a year without some sort of turmoil and August 1st seems to be a significant date for me.  I moved back to Portland from Olympia on August 1st, 2011.  Josh and I spent our first vacation together last year on August 1st. And this year August 1st was my last day at the job that I couldn't stand.  

I won't deny it.  I'm kind of freaking out.  Change is hard and scary. I had a job that paid REALLY well.  But it came down to the money or taking care of myself and my family.  I have spent the entire eight months of my employment in this position hating it.  I have gained 20 pounds.  I have neglected my friendships and my personal relationships. I have been so emotionally spent at the end of every day that all I can do is sit in the recliner, drink wine and watch TV.

Today was the first day of unemployment.  It was interesting.  I felt like I should be doing something all day long.  I did all of the laundry and I cleaned out the junk drawer.  I also took PJ to a movie for the first time in almost a year.  And I made dinner.  That was probably the weirdest thing of all.  I. MADE. DINNER.  I don't think that I have made dinner one time since Josh got here six months ago.  I certainly haven't done it on a weeknight.  I love cooking and I love baking and even that fell to the wayside.  

Unemployment is going to be interesting.  I don't plan on staying unemployed.  I plan to get at least a part time job and I am certainly going to go to school full time.  I do plan on taking a few weeks off and I plan on enjoying this time.  I also plan on never doing property management again.  And I plan to never lose sight of what's important in life.  It certainly isn't that Maserati.