Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Catalyst

When someone seeks to destroy you, there are two options; you either let them, OR you take everything they have no control over and say, "Oh HELL no!" Now repeat it out loud slowly (you think I'm kidding), "Oh...HELL... no!" You say it, you believe it, and then one day you look at life completely different. You look at everything good as though it's golden, you smile and laugh more freely, and give more genuinely. The best way to stop someone from destroying you, is so simple that it takes a while to really grasp...
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It's a rough thing getting your heart beaten to a pulp; bits of it mashed against every wall you look at; lurking on every computer screen, in every song, on every TV, and even in the faces of those closest to you. How do you conquer those evil bits of what's left? How do you bounce back from the beating? I'd long-assumed I wasn't the type of person to let someone knock me out so completely. I never knew what rock bottom looked like, until suddenly I was THAT girl. I was Adele rolling in the deep, and it was an ugly, lifeless, empty place. It's a place completely beyond understanding until suddenly there you are. I'd skipped through 29 years without ever enduring such complete, and seemingly endless suffering. Surely I'd had my heart broken before. Surely, this was not the man to break me. Yet, there I was... staring into space, crying into my coffee, and hoping that one day I would say the one thing that would bring him back.

I'm embarassed to speak of that time. I had self help books for bageezies! That said, somewhere in the middle of the mess, I realized how many others must've been through this; how all I needed was someone to reach out to who had not only been there, but had bounced back... with force. My greatest comfort became looking into the faces of strangers, and imagining their stories. What pain had they endured? I clung to the personal histories of acquaintances who had rebounded from nightmares, and I said to myself: "How did they get to a place where they're seemingly okay? What did they do? If they can carry on, so can I." Slowly, I went from walking dead, to a flicker of my former self, then finally after months of living only half a life I became the one thing I'd unknowingly lost sight of years earlier... After this disaster, cheesy as it may sound, I re-found... me.

In the past several years, I've seen my brain scanned, been tortured by mystery stomach pain, had my car mashed twice during a 32-car pile up, spun multiple times on the highway, and witnessed more life and death than I care to share while working at a news station. Nothing inspired me to start fresh, though I thought it would've, until this. This seemingly ordinary broken heart that forced me to re-examine everything that had ever been, everything that was, everything I'd done right, wrong, or indifferently. I looked at it all, and then... one day I woke up free, better, happy...

I didn't see that coming.
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In my next post I'll share the absolute BEST advice I found about how to recover. Most of the things I read were crap, some were ridiculous, and then there were the absolute gems. I'm a list girl, and so that's where I'll start. Lists, by the way, will be a common part of my blog. Also, after the next few posts, I hope for things to get much, much funnier. But, all things start somewhere, and this dear readers, is where I choose to begin... This will be a blog about a life, but right now it's a story of how I looked destruction in the face and said, "Oh HELL no!"