Who do you want to be today? Seems a simple enough question, right? The question and the answer are both incredibly simple, but as emotional beings we make it more difficult than it should be.
Who are you, right now, this moment? At the core of your being, who do you believe yourself to be? Now, who do you want to be in the next moment? Do you want to stay the same? Do you want to be lesser than what you were in the last moment, or do you want to be something better, something more?
In exactly one week, it will be 2 years to the day that I left my job/got laid off/took a buyout so someone with lesser seniority could keep the job she loved. I feel as if I’ve been in a fog for the better part of that two years, and now in retrospect, I can say I think I was. The worst time in my life was shortly after my divorce. My entire world had been turned upside down. I was drowning in debt. I owned nothing except for what fit in my car. I was crushed and broken and felt like my heart had been rolled and dusted in ground glass. But because I didn’t feel the same emotional upheaval and I wasn’t crying every day, I didn’t think this 2-year span of my life was any worse than, or even as bad as what I think of as “my dark days.”
But the similarities are eerily familiar. Drowning in debt? Check. World turned upside down? Check. Out of a job? Check. Emotions wrecked from a toxic work environment? Check. Health crushed and broken? Check. Being ill for so long before my diabetes diagnosis took its toll on me. And the amount of time it took to get it under control took an even further toll. I was having repeated infections, which in a healthy person will wear out the body. My body and glucose levels didn’t have time to recover before the next infection would hit. But because I had only been hospitalized the one time, I minimized the seriousness of the matter. Hey, I could get out of bed and manage to feed myself. I must be okay, right? I know I spent a lot of time complaining and being negative, and I would compound the negativity by beating up on myself. I was seriously ill and all I could think about was how I wasn’t getting better, what a horrible person I must be to be so whiney all the time, and how I was a failure at being a tough broad at my inability to get better. Is that fucked up or what? I wouldn’t heap all that shit on the shoulders of someone I loved. Why did I do it to myself?
I was taught to be strong, and resilient and self-reliant. For the first time in my life, I had to ask for help, and it was a strange, uncomfortable lump of pride to swallow. I needed more moral support than I ever had in my life. I was exhausted and overwhelmed all the time. I spent a lot of time avoiding even the basics of self-maintenance unless it was absolutely necessary. I was (more) depressed and started having anxiety attacks and muscle spasms. I had to borrow money. I hate just about every aspect of my life over the past 2 years. But that’s the key. The past.
As human, emotional beings, time is a linear thing. It helps us define the experiences of our lives and our growth. That was then, this is now, and the next thing isnt here yet. But who am I right now, and who do I want to be in the next moment? Today, this second, I am still the strong, capable woman I have been for many, many years. Two hours from now or tomorrow, my body might feel like hell. But I’ve realized I will still be that same woman, regardless of how bad I may feel physically. I might stay in bed all day and not get a thing done. But its because I’ve learned I cant push myself, not because I’m a failure or a wimp.
How I need to live my life has changed drastically in the last two years. Even before diabetes, I could push myself. Yes, I still had fibromyalgia, but I had learned how to manage that, and I could still burn the candle at both ends even if the candle I was burning had to be a shorter candle than earlier, younger candles. But I am now closer to 50 than I would like. My body is slowing down, simply because of the aging process. And I have fibromyalgia and I am diabetic. It was difficult to accept that my life and body were changing against my will. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a healthy, productive, active happy life anyway. It’s just going to look a little different. If…that’s what I choose.
We cannot change the past. Those moments and the events transpiring in them are gone. Forever. We cannot get them back. We have right now. This moment. And we have the future. I have who I am today, and who I choose to be tomorrow. We all do. Tomorrow I may choose to feel sad, and lay on the couch. I may choose to clean the entire house. Or my body may be rebelling against me from anxiety, depression or my disease, and I may choose to be kind to myself, and wait it out.
I am not my emotions. My emotions are not what defines me or who I am. They are feelings. I can choose to experience them, and deal with them. Or I can choose to avoid them, ignore them, minimize them, or fear them. I spent two years making that choice. I want to choose something different now. I want to choose to return to the life I was meant to have, the life I wanted. That has to look a little differently now, but rarely do we ever get what we expected or imagined for ourselves. I can still choose to have goals and to live a full and happy life, loving people that matter to me along the way. I can choose to release the anger and bitterness of the last two years. That release may take some time, still. But I can choose to try to release all that negativity. I can choose to be a more positive person right now. I can choose to do the things I know I must to ensure my health, and all the secondary things that follow. I can choose to find solutions even while things look bleak. I can choose to feel afraid and keep going anyway without allowing the panic to overwhelm me. I can choose and choose and choose, because there is always the next moment, and the next moment and the next until I no longer draw breath, and my heart stops. I may not have any choice about that. But I can and will continue to make billions of choices for however many billions of seconds I have left on this planet.
Who do you want to be today?
