wake up and put your big girl panties on

there is nothing like thinking that you are going to die that will wake you the hell up. happened to me over two years ago. when we are young, we really do live as if we are immortal. we think everything will be the same, and that life goes on. but then something happens like you are burying your parents in your 30s and you realize that it doesn't go on. sometimes it just comes to an abrupt dead stop. 

i then started to think that my life could end as well...at any time without warning, and i started to worry only because i had my brood to raise. i knew that if something happened to me that there would be no one to take care of them. they would become abandoned cubs in the forest. so i used to pray to my goddess to just let me live long enough that they would reach adulthood and take care of themselves...or at the very least take care of one another. and finally, when the day came that my youngest went off to university, i exhaled.

i did not have those empty nest issues you hear of from most parents. frankly, it was quite the opposite. i had prepared myself for this departure. i missed my offspring insanely, and partly didn't want them to leave but had i not raised them to be adults at some point? i had been on my own since nineteen and never looked back because i had no one to take care of me but me. so i pushed my younglings hard to become independent, maybe too hard at times...but that is how it is when you are the only parent. you are afraid to be too soft and ruin them. i was afraid of enabling them as i had seen other parents do. and after the apron strings were severed, i had to start thinking about what it was that i was going to do with my life since it had not evolved into the life i had once thought it would be.

the thing that gnawed at my soul was the fact that i did not complete university. i had a family to raise and kept telling myself "someday." it is impossible when you are juggling two to three jobs at a time, and responsible for the lives and well-being of three other humans, without any assistance of extended family or support system. you cannot even consider going to school in this situation. so the day had come to fill that desire that had been gnawing at my cerebral cortex for decades. i went back to university...and i went in fear.

i feared that my brain would not keep up. i felt stupid. i felt that i had not stimulated my brain enough because i spent the past twenty-five years in survival mode and not expanding it with enough academic information. the fears dissipated as soon as my brain woke up and recognized that this was the stuff that it really enjoyed doing. everything fascinated me and i wanted to take everything offered. three years later, i found myself in pure elation and bliss, sitting on a stage of an amphitheater in a beautiful grove of trees, decked in a black gown, mortar board, and pink flip-flops, filled with a satisfaction i had not known but heartbroken that my tribe were not there to share the moment with me. i did not just do this for me, i also did it for them.

now i was ready to take on the world. my future was filled with plans of working on my masters in education, and most definitely experiencing travel around the globe. i had discovered couchsurfing and was planning on giving myself a graduation present to italy...no point in letting all of those art history courses go to waste! but my plans unraveled with a delay of a knee surgery...followed by a near fatal auto accident that derailed my life. as i saw the speeding car heading directly for me, i remember my last thought..."oh my god, i am going to die."

i guess it just wasn't my time but there i lay strapped to a board with a c-collar around my neck being placed in a med-wagon. i had no sense of much of anything but this fact...i was alone. there was no one to come for me. in time, i was released and told that i had to be watched for the next three days. but there was no one to do that either. i lay in pain drifting in and out of drug-induced sedation unable to move. that was when i knew that i needed to wake up and drink the coffee because just smelling it is not enough.

my life spiraled downward and it was no longer the life that i knew. i discovered how easily it is to become homeless...to lose everything. i discovered that the people who flit around you when times are good are not there when times are bad. my life has been completely flipped upside down and i wondered if it would ever be right-side-up again. notice the two year gap on this blog...i could not even THINK let alone write during this period. i have been in "struggling to survive" mode with memory issues and just trying to heal for over two years. 

i am now in "put your big girl panties on and start your life anew" mode. i am going to make plans. i am going to get my life back. and i am going to make the best of it while i still have it...because life is too damn short not to LIVE.