"No matter what our troubles, when the earth turns on its axis one more time and we see what appears to be the sun rising, I feel it's the universe calling for a change in ourselves. You have one more day. Rise with it!" --Oprah Winfrey
How I believe this statement! While I have hardly cornered the market in terms of being assaulted with life's melange of miseries, I've had my fair share of riding the Life Sucks Express. Like millions of women out there, I've been dumped, fired, downsized (you know, the same thing as being fired without you having done anything wrong), and even stared down the barrel of bankruptcy, sinking to the point that I actually wondered why I was alive because NOTHING was going right. And yet, the sun would continue to rise and set, the world would keep moving on (even though I could swear it was coming to an end), and as the days pressed on I slowly managed to recreate myself and my life.
You, too, can recreate yourself. It's not impossible, regardless of the circumstances. In February of 2000, I had, in the space of one week, been dumped by my then-boyfriend on Monday, lost my beloved Nanny (grandmother Angelina "Angela" Rose DeCiel) on a Tuesday and was downsized that very Friday. So there I was, on a Friday night, a young woman who normally would have dressed herself up and gone out carousing, but I didn't (A) have a boyfriend; (B) have foreseeable income beyond my last paycheck; or (C) have a grandmother to cry to anymore about life's bumps and bruises.
So instead I slumped down on the kitchen floor of my apartment, overwhelmed because I came up snake eyes in love and money simultaneously. I felt like the Human Lodestone. What was I supposed to do after getting a one-two punch like the one life had just dealt me? At the time, I lived in a tiny apartment in a bad neighborhood, where the police, fire department or ambulance would log in frequent flier miles for either the old people who kept croaking or the young people who kept partying. My family couldn't bail me out financially. I was on my own...
That night I didn't even have the strength to find a chair to sit on or tissues to blow my nose with. I eventually found myself lying down on the cheap linoleum floor of my miniscule galley kitchen, sobbing. For hours. I wanted to die. I felt rejected, as a woman and as a professional. I didn't know how I was supposed to face the dating pool again after having been out of it for a few years. I didn't even know how I was going to scrape up enough money to make next month's rent to keep living in my hellhole. I was too tired, too overwhelmed, to even think of how to kill myself, however. That would take planning and ambition. I couldn't think straight long enough to get up off the floor. So I fell asleep where I lay, alone in the dark. In that moment, no one could ever have told me that life would get better; I wouldn't have believed them. In fact, I would have spat in their face for trying to make me feel better with anything that resembled hackneyed two-dimensional verbal slush like, "It'll all turn around, just you wait and see." Whatever.
But you know what? When the sun rose the next day, I picked myself up off the floor. I didn't kill myself. (No kidding, I'm writing this blog.) The emotional storm had passed. I felt that I had hit rock bottom, so I set a very simple goal. Every day would be better than the one before, even if it was by just one percent. I could handle one percent improvement, couldn't I? If I could get up off the floor and push myself through the next 24 hours, I could keep moving slowly and steadily toward progress.
No matter how abysmal my existence, the earth continued turning on its axis, and the sun continued to rise. Over time it sunk in that every day represented a new day, a new chance, and potentially a new me. Like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog's Day, I would be given another chance to wake up and try my life a different way. And believe me, the way MY life went at times, it would literally feel like the same exact scenario played over and over again, down to the music I'd hear on the radio driving back and forth to work, in the same exact rotation. (Well, what did I expect listening to Top 40 stations all the time? LOL)
Eventually, patterns would break and I'd have breakthroughs. I found a new job, one that honestly paid me more than the one I had been downsized from, and my professional life has been pretty stable with steady and consistent improvement, ever since. In time, the pain from the loss of my Nanny, who was my best friend, lessened. (Although no one will ever replace my Nanny, she was the coolest octagonarian I've ever met). Also, I didn't get dumped anymore. In fact, I found the right person for me and got engaged last October...we're getting married in August of 2007. Did I receive a total romantic reversal of fortune overnight? Please. NO. But every day was a new lesson. Each time a relationship didn't work out, I'd take out the black box from the wreckage of our crashed couplehood and study it, learn from it, and move on. Each man I dated until the search ended with my fiancee was better than the one before. The drama decreased dramatically. (Look, Ma, alliteration, and I wasn't even trying!)
If this blog does anything, I would like it to serve as a testimony to women who are in this moment suffering that you can in fact pick your sad self up, dust it off, and find happiness. You have to believe it's possible, because it IS. As you read this blog over the coming days, months, years, it is my hope that you will in fact believe that it's possible and turn your life around.
This isn't Chicken Soup for the Soul: 2007 Women's Edition. It's just simple truth, take it or leave it. People, if I could do it, I absolutely promise you that you can, too. My life is a very, very far cry from that horrible night in 2000 when I bawled my eyes out in a galley kitchen located on the wrong side of the tracks. Lo and behold, the earth continued to turn on its axis, days passed into weeks, weeks into years, and instead of continuing to lie on the mat KO'd by a killer of a week, I came out a champion. I'm getting married to a healthy, happy man, I make a SWEET salary, and my credit score is in the 800s (i.e. no more bankruptcy worries for me). I live in the home of my dreams, in a totally desirable neighborhood.
Am I the smartest person in the world? Nah. Am I some model-perfect woman? Nah redux. Am I anyone so super powerful that I'd just experienced a moment of kryptonite back in 2000 and I never had problems before or afterward? Yeah, right. I wish. I'm an average, everyday person, who learned quite a few lessons that I'd like to share with women throughout the world and I hope this blog serves as a good platform for that. I want to touch as many lives as possible, to give hope to anyone who feels that when they pray for a better life, God's out on Miracle Call or something, and just doesn't get the message. God helps those who help themselves. And if it isn't a brand new day by the time you read this, it soon will be. And you can start over, and make your life better one percent at a time. Because if this ordinary average girl can, millions more ordinary average girls can, too. Why not?
"[Life] is demanding of me, 'Start again. Begin new things. Again set to work to build your world.'" --Jean Toomer
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