This Is My Year

This is my year.

This is the year that I want to take control of who I am, what I eat, how I communicate, how I look, how I feel, how I love, and how I live.

This is my year, when I will learn to be honest with myself by paying attention to the most inner part of my soul; when I connect with those with whom I need to connect; when I learn to listen to myself through my own ears and through others’; when I repair myself.

This is the year that counts.

Man, I hope I don’t fuck it up.

The past few years have been difficult. Downright awful at times. I know the feeling of despair, of believing that my legs and the earth beneath my feet can no longer support me, that it would be easier if I could disappear. I have been unbelievably lonely yet I think I hid it well, for the most part. Luckily, I was able to feel periods of clarity – even rapture – at those many glorious yet simple times with my two children, without whom I don’t know how I would still be here. They have unknowingly and unselfishly found minuscule specs of my inner strength that multiplied exponentially upon exposure. I hope I can get them to understand someday how much they have held me up.

After delivering my second child, several of my inner organs decided that they were unhappy with their positions and subsequently moved downward. I tried to cope with their change of address by doing endless kegels and ensuring that I was never more than a ten-second walk from a toilet. More than once (more than several dozen times, if truth be told), I didn’t or couldn’t make it to a toilet. I peed in the garbage bin in my office. Twice. I peed in the bushes. I peed in a water glass at an undisclosed location. I peed when I ran, jumped, laughed, coughed, or hiccoughed. Having sex felt weird because my uterus was so unusually low. I was limited in what I could do, where I could go, intimidated by the control my body had over me, and I felt like crap. In November, 2010, I inhaled the happiness that is general anesthetic and a wonderful surgeon fixed my plumbing. After nearly a decade of feeling – quite frankly – gross, I feel absolutely fantastic. This has been life-changing. No hyperbole here (my sociology prof used to pronounce it HI-per-bole)…this normal body functioning is terrific stuff and I couldn’t be more grateful for the freedom it has given me. I went kickboxing today where I skipped rope without peeing. This is the beginning.

But hang on, please, and bear with me. You need just a little more before I can move forward with this.

I have made mistakes. I have made mistakes where I alone get hurt and mistakes so huge that I have made others cry with desperation or lash out in rage. I have worked through many mistakes, apologized for them, admitted my wrongs, and learned. I am still paying for some. I have accepted my mistakes and think that I’m ready to move on. But forget my mistakes? Not a chance. I’m not ready for that. And that’s really too bad because it means that I can’t shake the hurt and the guilt. That’s something I need to work on this year. I can forgive myself, but my heart won’t let it go. Maybe I need to be forgiven. In the same breath, I need to forgive others for some of the things they have – wittingly or unwittingly – said or done that hurt me. I have been blessed in my life to have made good friends who are loyal, honest, trustworthy, and who I love to death no matter if we see one another weekly or once a decade. These are the lifelong friends who will answer my call no matter what time of day or night and who will be empathetic, compassionate, understanding, brutally honest, and patient. I would do the same for them in a heartbeat and they know it. On the other hand, I have had to deal with disappointments, betrayals, and sophomoric pettiness. I realize that this is not especially unusual and that it’s so yin-yang and that everyone has similar thoughts and experiences, and blah blah blah, but this is my story. I don’t know how it will play out over time, but I have high hopes. And it matters.

So, this is where I am. I am on sabbatical for the entire year and don’t return to work until January 2012. My approved academic project is to write a book (details on that later) and I am enormously excited about it. Given the flexibility that a sabbatical provides to my day-to-day living, I see the next 12 months as an opportunity to pay attention to myself: to attend fitness classes, cook healthy meals every day (but not get overcome with guilt if I miss a few), read, meet with friends, learn to meditate. Maybe I’ll even tackle the linen closet.

(Written in January 2011)