The Anniversary

Today is the anniversary of the day my life changed forever. 

I’ve seen it coming and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  I don’t know why it makes me so emotional.  It’s just a day.  But when I think back to that day, it stirs up so much emotion deep down within myself that it is so overwhelming that I don’t know what to do with myself.  I feel anger, sadness, surprise, astonishment, joy, comfort, wonder, and happiness all rolled into one.  It is like this conflux of emotions fighting with each other within my soul and it gets up to my heart, and I just feel like I am going to explode.  That is the only way that I can describe it.  It is like something that I have never felt before.  I couldn’t sleep last night because of it, so I sat up in bed in my new “home” in my temporary studio apartment in Cebu City and looked out into the lit up skyline and thought, “I am in Cebu in the Philippines in a sweet, downtown apartment, on my own, taking care of myself, and not only that, I have been doing it for one year now.”  That made me smile, and relax, and breathe a little bit deeper.  

I still didn’t sleep well.  It is a hard thing to wrap your head around…..All that change in such a short amount of time.  Honestly, it feels like just yesterday that I was sitting on my couch, my heart pounding out of my chest, psyching myself up to go catch my husband cheating on me.  I had a plan for that.  I didn’t have a plan for what happened next.  Not one, single, iota of a plan.  I didn’t know what was up or down or backwards or forwards.  Would I stay or would I go?  When I met my sister at my house later that same night, I stood in the kitchen with her staring at me asking me what I wanted to do.  I just stared back at her blankly, “I have no idea.  I didn’t think this far ahead.”  I had nothing packed, but she suggested that I come to her house for the night; and more likely, longer.  It’s very weird to walk into the bedroom that you have shared with your husband for the past 8 years and look around and try to pack.  But you’re not packing for vacation.  You don’t really know what you’re packing for.  And you can’t think.  And nothing makes sense.  Clothes don’t make sense.  Do I really need clothes?  At that point, you feel like you don’t really need anything.  And so it began….the beginning of my new life with a few sweaters and a pair or two of leggings in my bag.  I had no idea the adventures and the life that lay ahead of me.  What I do remember is the profound, crushing grief.  The feeling that I was at rock bottom and that there was absolutely nothing laying ahead for me.  I was losing everything. 

Little did I know that I was actually gaining everything.  And this is where that conflux of emotions comes in.  I am so happy to be where I am now.  Although I still grieve the past, and there is still so much uncertainty, there is also hope.  And there is joy.  And there is love.  It’s a different kind of love, but it is there.  This day means more to me than any other day on the calendar.  It is the day that I chose to make a change and make my life my own.  It is the anniversary of my re-birth.  I am so happy to have been physically born on November 14th, but December 1st is my real birthday.  This is the day I had the courage to stand up for myself.  To start living my inner truth and really set my spirit free.  As I said, I didn’t know it at the time, and it sure felt like an end and not a beginning, but the Universe has a way of showing you the light if you are just brave enough to open your eyes a little bit wider.  

Happy Birthday to me.  May every year be brighter than the last…This one wasn’t that bad after all……