It’s been a long while since I wrote any love letters to myself or done any honest soul searching. Why not? I have no idea. Writing just hasn’t been on the top of my To Do list for almost a year and I’ve been slowly fading into life’s background, not even realize what was happening. This must be what it’s like to quietly drift away, to become just a memory to those you once spent so much time with, laughed with, cried with. I’ve just been GONE, the person I once was has disappeared momentarily. Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing because, just maybe, I need to change.

Honestly, I don’t even know how I really feel about it because it has been so hard to actually feel and I’m not even sure that I’ve been missed or have really missed anything truly important. All I know is that life is going on around me and I’m not participating anymore, I’m just going through the motions. Call it depression, growing old, losing interest in the life I once led but either way, it’s a hard pill to swallow when the reality sets in at 3:30 in the morning that you just aren’t the old you anymore and asking for help doesn’t really seem worth it.

Well, that was sad and morose wasn’t it?

I woke up early this morning to a memory of a wonderfully fun time I spent with a dear friend, someone who was always my go-to for fun. This person is still in my life but now we are lucky if we see one another maybe twice a year and it has been this way for the last 10 years. I have let my life get away from me for that long and the realization woke me up from a deep sleep. The more I thought about my awesome friend the darker I felt inside, deep down in a well of regret and disappointment over allowing myself to get to this point in the first place. This led me to thinking about other parts of my life where I am falling short or, at the minimum, need to make changes.

Now, in all fairness I have always been a procrastinating day dreamer but I also made a point of staying in constant touch with the people who brought meaningful connection and excitement into my life. While I’ve never been a particularly extraverted person I’m also not the sort to voluntarily choose solitude if presented with a better option, or so I thought. Why am I doing it now? So many questions. Maybe I should go back to therapy? My daughter thinks I should and frankly, she’s more in touch with reality right now than her old mother is so I really should listen. I should and have no valid reason not to.

Getting older, slower and less agile of mind and body is an eye opener, one that slaps me in the face each morning when I realize once again that I have put off everything I planned to do the day, week, month or year before. I said I would call, I did not. I intended to take care of the paperwork that’s been sitting on my desk for almost a year, I did not. I meant to go see the people I once dropped everything for but again, I did not. Over and over, the alarm goes off, the day starts and still nothing changes. My real life embodiment of the movie Groundhog Day over and over and over and over. One would think I’d be exhausted but maybe I’m just so used to being exhausted that I no longer recognize what it is anymore.

Now, before anyone gets alarmed and starts thinking I’m going to off myself let’s not get too excited! The fact that I am writing this all out in shockingly to the point candor is a good thing. I promise it is. Writing all of this out now helps because it acts as a public reminder that I’m announcing a need to change and by doing so I am attempting to veer off my usual path of apathetic melancholy. Call it a much needed shock to the system or a literary defibrillation tool used to forcefully wake me up. I want to be fully alert, aware and honest about what’s going on, not blissfully numb with my head stuck in the sand like so many others around me.

I will get back to jotting down thoughts, penning funny little tales and, most importantly, reconnecting with the people that matter most to me. Writing is the thing that saved me when I was a kid, it grounded me as a young adult and it freed me as fought my way through family disfunction, abuse, the failure of my first marriage and it can free me from apathy now. It’s the one constant that has never failed me when so many others have. I’m crawling back, no worries! Older yet still as opinionated and forceful as ever because I didn’t come this far just to let the negative ghosts of the past win now.

The past can’t win because I won’t let it and if there is anything that sums me up it’s the word STUBBORN. I was born to cause the dishonest to stub their toes on the truth just by virtue of being in my presence. That’s a grand pronouncement right? Time to start living up to it.

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