Eat Pray Love….Search June 21, 2010

Summer reading update: I finished ‘Eclipse’ on Saturday and started ‘Eat Pray Love’.  I am almost through the Italy portion of the book.  I just read a passage that got me thinking.  Liz and her friend are discussing words.  Meaning, the one word that describes a place or a person.  For example, they decide that the city of Rome’s word is ‘sex’.  New York’s word is ‘achieve’.  Liz’s friend then asks her, ‘What is your word?’  Which of course, immediately made me wonder what my word is.

I am finding myself relating to Liz on a very personal level.  I am the same age now that she was when she began her journey.  Its true that I’ve never been married.  Never bought a house.  Never went through a divorce.  However I have found myself sobbing in the middle of the night looking for answers to questions about my life that no one else can answer but me.  I have found myself begging God for an answer, just like her.  Then again, I think if everyone was honest, we could probably all admit to that.  Liz decides her word is perhaps ‘seek’.

So this brings me to my word.  The first words that came to mind – love, family, friend – are the kind of words that would be nice to claim.  But things are not so simple.  Life is not so neatly wrapped up in happy thoughts.  After some thinking, I realized that my word is ‘search’.

I am forever searching for something.  What exactly, I cannot say.  For a long, long time, I thought that if I could find real love, that would be enough to fulfill me.  Now, finally, I have that.  I have my Smarty – my best friend, the ying to my yang.  The one.  And that part of my life is full.  It brings me great happiness and comfort.  But still I search.

I believe that if I could find a life purpose, that may do it.  I went to college and then grad school and then the business world thinking that if I could be successful there, that would make me happy.  And maybe if I wasn’t in a job I hate, that might help.  But I don’t know.  Other people work there and seem to not be as miserable as I am.  So perhaps it is me and not the work.  That scares me.  I fear sometimes that I will never find my career.  That no job will make me happy.  My dream in life is to live in Key West, own a shop of some kind on Duvall Street and watch the sun set over Mallory Square every night with my Smarty.  Maybe I am searching when the answer is ‘Daisy, you’ve been talking about Key West for 10 years.  Just do it already’.  I don’t know.

Maybe I will feel like my search is over when one day I have a family.  I’m sure that will bring tremendous fulfillment.  But I also know that motherhood alone is not the answer.  I know too many women who seem to lose themselves completely when they become ‘mom’ and that terrifies me.  (I don’t want to end up like those people on ‘STFU Parents’.  Nor do I want to start wearing sweatpants in public.  Or mom jeans.)  I know myself well enough to know that that alone will not be enough for me.  I will always need some kind of work.

My other thought is that I am just overthinking all of this.  People live their lives everyday and I have to guess that the majority of them don’t have the answers either.  Maybe that is the point.  Once you find all the answers, is life then over?  Isn’t the search the interesting part?

Perspective June 7, 2010

I mentioned in my very first post about my car accident of a few weeks ago.  Today I spent a good part of the afternoon complaining to poor Smarty that I have yet to be reimbursed by the insurance company and what is even worse, I have not heard from either mine nor the other guy’s insurance company since before Memorial Day.  In the meantime, interest is getting added to the deductible and rental car fees that I paid with my credit card thinking surely I would have a check in hand by the time the statement came.  I don’t and it did.  The statement showed up today in my inbox.  So, complain complain complain.

After working myself into a tizzy, an email popped into my inbox with a post from my cousin’s blog.  I’ll call her Lucy.  Lucy is 28 years old and has leukemia.  That is what her blog is about…her feelings, the process she is going through, how she is doing.  It is getting hard to read.  Lucy is an up person and very positive usually.  It’s hard to think of her feeling down when she still has a long fight ahead of her.  She has a baby and a husband and parents and a sister and nieces…so much to fight for.  It’s hard to process what is happening to her when I can remember as a kid going to her mom’s baby shower when she was still pregnant. 

It puts everything into perspective.  That sounds like a Hallmark-y thing to say but it is really true.  A $400 charge on my credit card stinks, but I’ll live.  I have a boring job that I complain about constantly, but I have a healthy body that gets me there and back every day.  My dog wakes me up too early sometimes, but the point is that we both wake up every morning.  You can’t ask for more than that.

I realize my posts here have been all over the place.  But you know, such is life.  Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down, sometimes you just want a new pair of sequined shoes.