Today I find myself at sixes and sevens, so I thought I might as well be honest about it.  I actually feel anxious, and haven’t really in a while.  But I know it needs to work itself out.

Life is about change, right?  I get that, but I have to say I have had so much change that today life just feels overwhelming.

A lot of these feelings are working their way to the surface as I write a pitch for a magazine to see if they will take me and all my scribbling glory.

I look around at my friends with their lives, marriages, children.  They have been at it so long, they make it in some cases look effortless, which I know couldn’t be further from the truth.

I always had the instincts of a nester.  I suppressed those instincts for years.  I let them finally surface in my last relationship and they were kind of taken advantage of.  It’s hard to accept and acknowledge that in the past, I was in essence the cow that gave the milk for free – what every mother warns her daughter against.  I am so grateful I am out of that relationship, but it hurt, and since I got my diagnosis, on occasion, it haunts me.   Part of me wishes I could have had the opportunity to tell that jackass face to face he was a jackass, but as he was too much of a coward to ever discuss what he did, I had to put a period on the end of that sentence for myself.  But I know that I am a bigger and better person then all of this and not the one who will be perpetually stuck in their head, and in time these residual tremors will fade.  God did me a favor, but I know I have to acknowledge this crap in order to completely put it behind me.    And truthfully, I am not angry.  I just think about it sometimes.  And given who I have in my life now, I am annoyed with myself that this crap creeps into my brain.

I have been that cow in the workplace too, and want that no more. 

But it’s the getting to where you want that is just so much easier if you are a character in a work of lierary fiction or a made for T.V. movie.  The reality of all this is that the getting there is a lot of work.  And trust me, I am willing to put in the work, and I can visualize the end result.  Yet I find self-doubt.  And this morning I am almost irrationally fearful.

I think I have faced this whole breast cancer thing remarkably well, and am taking the steps to better my life in other ways.  Yet I am anxious and I am tired.  Am I tired because I am anxious?  Or am I just tired because of everything that has gone on? Am I just being weak or alternately too hard or demanding on myself?

I have to admit that right now I am envious of my friends who are stay at home moms.  I realize that being one is indeed a full-time job, but they have this sense of place of where they belong.  Heart and head.  I know where I belong with my heart, and that is a certainty I have.  But my head is a little unsettled as I try to work it all out and work through things towards my desired result.  And truthfully, it is the addition of breast cancer that has thrown me in to a bit of a swirl some days.  I wish I could just afford to take six months off and just be.  And saying that makes me feel really guilty.  But the financial reality is I cannot do that. And well, the way my head works I might only last two months doing  that.

You all, (my friends, family, and sweet man) have been so patient with me and I hate feeling anxious and dare I say, needy.  It doesn’t sit well with me.   One of the hardest things about all of this is realizing that you do have to just let go some days, not over think, and not be afraid to depend on people or fear owing people so much that one might never repay. 

I sound ungrateful, and I am not.  I am grateful.  It’s just hard some days.    And again, I am dealing with so much at once.

So I am going to end this post with my favorite poem by Robert Frost and a prayer in thanks dedicated to all of  are helping me through this.  I have so many blessings in all of you, and day by day, inch by inch the rest of it will right itself.  After all, there are people in my life whom I love who have lost so much more and handled it with amazing grace – literally.

I am o.k. – no worries my friends.  It’s just that in   real and unvarnished  not made for T.V. life some days are going to make you feel at sixes and sevens. And some days it is just hard for me to have the faith in myself that all of you have in me.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.