“This year I met my soulmate. The person who cares for me. The person who loves me. The person who accepts me, even in my brokenness. The person who keeps me safe from harm. The person I love to be with. The person who makes me feel beautiful. The person who completes me.

This person is me.

I also met my one true love. And realized I have been married to him the whole time.“

September 30, 2020

Wow. What a year it has been.

50 was extraordinary. I grew so much, I have never known it’s equal. Growth doesn’t come in comfort, unfortunately. It has it’s price. We pay for it in humility and often pain. We pay in discomfort. During, we might even find ourselves bitter and angry, wishing we could undo the events that brought us to where we are. We may wish it was possible to return to our sleepier selves; before whatever it was forced us onward.

Is it worth it? In time, it usually is. When I look back on my life, I wish certain things could have been different. But 10 years after, 20, it’s difficult to imagine my life happening any other way than it did. I wish I could have been spared the more painful events of my life but have also reached a wonderful and enlightened place that amazes me. I do not believe I could have reached this place otherwise.

If you had asked me about my life a year ago, as I was turning 50, I would have told you I had little ahead of me. That my obligation to my family was all that held me here. I had been dangerously depressed through the summer months of 2019 and there was a great deal of vulnerability in turning 50. The summer had gutted me. I was shell shocked by the terror and darkness I had lived through.

I was also angry and reckless with what remained. And I wasn’t done falling yet. By the end of October, what remained of my house of cards had collapsed and I finally floated to rest on the bottom. Unbelievably, I did float the last few feet instead of smashing into the bottom at the terminal velocity of my summer months. After so much falling, it was a soft landing and I am grateful for that. But there I was, at the bottom.

November 1, 2019, is the day I think of as the beginning of my healing. The long months in crisis had turned my weekly therapy sessions into “lets make a plan to get to the next appointment.” It was day-to-day survival. There was neither the time nor the energy to talk about the past and most definitely not the future. November gave me a chance to start inching forward again. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to do it, but committing to healing instead of just surviving gave me hope that I could.

Marriage counseling became a necessary part of this. I had talked around my therapist’s recommendation that my husband and I see a colleague of hers for several weeks. Then she got more pointed about it. We found ourselves seated on a sofa that seemed a bit too small. I was clutching a throw pillow on my lap wondering if this therapist made note of what happened to the pillow, who clutched it, did it get turned sideways to fit between like a wall, did it get put on the floor. All that. We went for a few weeks of discussing the positives in the relationship, picking out songs for each other and writing letters before we got down to business.

I have spent a lifetime swallowing my words. Although I have always been a writer and a person adept to discussing feelings, there are areas of my life where I have been helplessly mute. My marriage was one of them. Over time, this dealt an almost fatal blow to the relationship. The things I’d kept inside.

My previous relationships had been abusive at the end and had resulted in me being shattered and heartbroken. It was all I’d known when I met my husband. I’d been in therapy during then as well. I’d learned a lot. I’d grown. I knew I had to do better in the men I chose. I was looking for someone like my husband. When I met him, I only knew he was not like them. I’d never been in a healthy relationship before. I didn’t feel worthy of it or of him. I held a belief that I was the messed up one and I couldn’t let him know this or I would lose him. I was so grateful to be with someone dependable, kind and steady that I was willing to pay (what I believed) was the price for it. This was the fatal error on my part. Simple things. Things that could have been negotiated and settled at the beginning. If I had believed I was worth them, then.

This actually IS an example of one of these issues: During our newlywed days, my husband stated that he wasn’t a touchy sleeper and liked his space. I had always dreamed of marriage being falling asleep in someone’s arms with hugs and kisses in the morning. I felt sad when he told me this, but also reminded myself I was lucky to have someone like him and I could adjust. 23 years passed before I was able to (very tearfully, I remember this conversation well) tell him we were different in this way. That I needed and wanted to be held. Instead of having this conversation at the beginning, when something very easily could have been worked out between us, I spent countless nights staring at the ceiling, feeling unloved. Two decades of resentment over things like this can be fatal. In fact, at the point we started counseling, I was ready to admit we had a case of irreconcilable differences. That, as I neared 50, I could no longer be the woman without the snuggling and hand-holding and thus, we were at an impasse. I believed this was a non-negotiable thing between us due to one comment he made early on.

Everything is negotiable, though, between people who love each other. I had stored resentment, believing that I could not ask for anything not instinctually given. That me asking to be held for a few minutes wouldn’t count if I had to ask him for it. I take responsibility for the shape my marriage was in a year ago. It was my inability to communicate that caused it. It was the ease at which I could tell this to my friends but could not say the words to him, the person who needed to hear them that created the problems in the first place. His love for me had always been there but I had never told him how I needed to feel it.

I did the best I could as a 26-year-old newlywed. I had come so far. I just did not have all the skills I needed for a successful marriage, over time. My not wanting to hurt feelings, fear of my anger (mine and others), my lack of belief that I was even deserving of the love and attention I needed has harmed me vastly in my life. But none as much as it did my husband and my marriage.

It was almost ridiculously easy to put together again. There were no angry words or accusations in our therapy sessions. There were tears and the hope of things being better. There was a complete willingness on both sides to bridge the distance. And we started to heal.

I had continued in my own therapy journey as well during these months. My therapist and I were able to resume working on my past traumas, which had imprinted me with these negative beliefs about myself in the first place. Beliefs about my unworthiness, my fear that anyone who saw my soul would leave me immediately, my inability to speak for myself, my inability to discern what I needed were slowly corrected. And again, I started to heal.

January 1, 2020 felt like a clean start and a new chapter for me. I felt optimistic about it. 2020 would be a year of self-improvement. For the first time in years, I was able to make plans for myself and dreams for my future.

March 13, 2020, I was forced to stop. We were all forced to stop, everything. Suddenly. It frightened me, at first. The space of it. The stillness of it. Although I had been healing and doing much better, I had continued to stay busy, stay ahead of the depression, try not to think about it. I was still afraid to be alone. I felt fear if my husband went to bed before me. There was clear and present danger in the long hours of the night. Although I moved forward in optimism, there was fear in my steps. Afraid the summer would find me again and take me down with it. Quarantine was both anxiety-inducing and uncomfortable.

It didn’t last long. It turned into magic, as a matter of fact. Inside my home, with my husband, I became everything I was always meant to be.

The universe had conspired with me, in ways that would later seem just good timing. Our youngest child had moved out in December, leaving us as empty nesters. I had, just the weekend prior, become certified to teach Zumba. I had also taken my first saxophone lesson, a beginner at age 50. The months of couples counseling leading into quarantine had resulted in easy communication between my husband and me. There were no longer any secrets between us. The months of counseling I’d put into myself had resulted in a level of self-confidence I’d never felt before. I believed in myself and my worth. I was becoming more “me” than I’ve ever been, and I loved it.

While the TV news was always bleak and bad, my husband retained his job. He was grounded from travel (and still is.) We have been at home, together, all the days since then. We decided to re-visit all the foods we’d eaten as poor newlyweds (the Stove Top Chicken Casserole was the only thing as good as we remembered it.) We had evenings of putting our phones on the chargers and just talking. We became closer than we’ve ever been. While I regret the years that I interpreted as emotional distance, now feels so good I can’t even be mad about it. I’ve reached a place where I have so much love to give. I’ve reached a place where I’ve never felt so loved. We’ve been together for months, and each day I’m happy to get to spend another day with him. The marriage we began 25 years ago has fulfilled it’s destiny of being my one true love. My love without pain.

I grew into quarantine and made it mine. For my once a week grocery trip I decided to dress up in costumes. My therapy, saxophone lessons and fitness classes moved to zoom. I had the opportunity to have zoom breakfasts, dinners and Happy Hours with people I would not have seen otherwise. I began teaching my own Zumba class during quarantine. Zumba For Shut-Ins, which began as something temporary, became a standard Saturday morning thing for us. My husband is my tech support and main furniture mover. I’m joined by siblings, parents, in-laws my mother and numerous friends across the country.

As the year progressed, things only got better for me and for us. The energy I had been spending elsewhere before the quarantine was funneled directly back to me and our marriage. I was freebasing my time and energy and it was fabulous.

I would not normally take a birthday to list my accomplishments, but I am very proud of myself for everything I was able to do this past year. Most importantly, I lived. I am here to write this post. I am here to tell others to keep on fighting, that hope is never fully extinguished.

I raise a glass to the year I was 50. You were amazing!

• I became a Zumba instructor. When it became obvious I would not be able to have an in person class at this time – I learned about teaching online instead of waiting for gyms to reopen.
• I started this blog, which is painfully honest, on topics that are difficult to talk about. Suicide, depression, narcissistic abuse, racial issues, how trauma affects our lives, and how to heal it. I have spent up to 10 hours on each post and have pushed out 39 of them in 2020. In the hopes they will find those who need them when they need them.
• I was able to break with all the addictions and compulsions I used in my life as crutches, and gained the skills to face things directly.
• I learned to play the saxophone. I’d had 1 in person lesson before quarantine began. I continue to meet with my teacher on zoom. I’m almost finished with my 5th Grade book!
• I educated myself on the monarch lifecycle. A monarch egg in the wild has a 2% chance of becoming a butterfly. I have raised this to 80% for the ones I’ve taken in. I have released 30 so far and fortunately, we get them year-round here in SW FL.
• I continued therapy, no matter how difficult or painful it became. I faced my BS. I felt every experience that harmed me a second time as we dug into every one of them. When they were raised they brought every bit of poison with them. I felt each one acutely, for days, before it evaporated and left me a lighter person. This was necessary to buy back my soul, and it was worth it.
• As I became a more authentic person, every relationship in my life deepened. For the first time in my life, I was able to truly appreciate how loved I am.
• I maintained the goal weight I achieved in Nov 2018 even though WW meetings moved online and I didn’t love it.
• I learned to support my adult children instead of believing their struggles were a direct reflection on me and how I had failed them.
• We were able to heal and improve our marriage. Of all these things, I am most grateful for this.
• I started reading again.
• I learned new skills to cope with anxiety and stress that were not self-destructive.
• I recently auditioned for a play and am happy to be back in the theater again.
• I ended toxic relationships and situations in my life. Although I resisted having to do this and it was a painful thing to do, it was also the right thing to do. My healing accelerated in its wake.
• I redecorated the room where I’d spent 3 very dark and desperate days last summer. I did this during the quarantine by making three designs and having my FB friends vote on them.
• I acted the call to social justice work that I heard a few months ago. I stopped running my mouth and started doing the work, where it mattered. Black people – your life matters. Your life matters to me.
• I redid all our landscaping. Business in the front, party in the back. I have the backyard of a grown-up 5-year-old. It’s fantastic.
• We were able to pay off my car and get out of quite a lot of other debt.

Today, you are you, that is truer than true.

There is no one alive who is Youer than You!

Dr. Suess