Fearlessness Revisited (T-Minus 146 Days)

On Sunday morning, moments before running the Nike Women’s Marathon, Digital Royalty’s Amy Jo Martin posted a blog entry about being Fearless. In the face of adversity greater than turning 30 and still being single, she writes if we want to be free, we need to fear LESS and how that has epitomized her life over the last few years.

This struck a chord, as some may remember my one and only New Year’s Resolution this year was to Be Fearless and I realized Sunday I have been doing anything but. Directly stolen from Self Magazine, I wrote:

BE FEARLESS.

If you make one resolution this year, let it be to live boldly.
You control this moment: rather than cautiously test the water, 
dive straight into life with freeing abandon.
Imagine the person you want to be and the life you want to live, 
and then simply commit to them.
Believe in yourself. Embrace your beauty. Discover a new passion.
And whatever you do, wherever you go, don’t be afraid to make a splash.

I have spent a lot of time doing the imagining part, but not so much the committing. Or the believing. Or the embracing.

So I started to wonder what exactly it is I am afraid of and I think I got at least a partial answer today.

Once or twice a year I have the inexplicable desire to Facebook/LinkedIn/Google stalk the ex known as The Asshole, or the man who broke me. Some part of me must sense when he is going through major life changes because I have managed to stalk days within his engagement, wedding and now, the birth of his first child.

Something about today was harder to handle than the rest. I never really thought there was a chance of us getting back together, but the presence of a child confirms that. He officially is married to someone who is basically the same person as I and they have a child. There is tiny, miniscule, infinitesimal part of me that wishes it were me.  

I think about the person I was when he and I were together and it’s largely who I would like to be again. Confident, strong and happy. I didn’t sleep through 5 a.m. workouts, spend time at work looking for other jobs or use Friday nights as an excuse to drink wine alone (OK, maybe the latter occasionally).

I knew what I wanted. And I lost my groove.

If the skinn(ier), healthier, happier, more motivated version of me wasn’t enough then, who is to say it will be if I work to find that woman again?

So there you go, it turns out I am scared of success. Or at least still failing in the face of success.

Which is so beyond stupid.

Maybe being Fearless is a little bit too much to take on at once. Maybe it’s more important to heed Amy Jo Martin’s words and just fear a little bit less right now.  To let myself be vulnerable again and be OK with it, instead of making excuses.

Here’s to 5 a.m. workouts again I guess.

Eternal Flame (152 Days)

It’s been awhile since I have mentioned Sparks, though I have to admit it was not for lack of thought on my part. I think about him more than I care to admit, especially late at night after one too many drinks when thoughts tend to turn into drunk texts. Even intoxicated, our banter is pretty sizzling and by the end of the conversation, I will inevitably bring up the idea of us getting together.  To which he will check his schedule and turn me down.

And I will feel silly, but brush it off until the next morning when I think “Did I really do that? Again? He has to think I’m psycho, clueless and pitiful.”

To use an extended fire metaphor (you know I love those), I likened the process to me attempting to poke the coals and get the embers to relight, while he was the gust of wind that kept snuffing them out.

After this happened again Thursday evening, I decided Friday morning the fire needed to go out. The sparks needed to be snuffed. And so I sent him a note admitting I knew I was crazy to still hold onto what happened seven months ago and letting him know how foolish I feel for the texts, calls and propositions. I apologized and tried to cover everything up, like a skilled outdoorswoman leaves no trace after putting out a campfire.

To say his response was not what I expected is an understatement.

I’m going to keep the details to myself (well and to two of my BFFs who I immediately shared his email with), but suffice to say, I’m happy with it. I mean, we’re not together and we’re likely not getting together any time soon, but there was apparently no need for me to feel foolish or silly or pitiful and for the first time since it all started, we are clearly on the same page.

In short, the embers have been relit.

As far as Sparks and I are concerned, there is an Eternal Flame.

And because I know it’s been in your head since you read the title:

Update, Anger & Alchemy (T-Minus 160 Days)

Well I guess this is the new definition of “it’s been awhile.” I think this is probably as long as it’s ever been between entries and I would be very pleased to tell you it’s because I have been quite busy having completely salacious sex with a guy I met while crossing the street.

Alas, that could not be further from the truth.

I carried through on my Sept. 11 promise to do something I had been putting off and I wrote a letter full of things I have wanted to tell someone and never could. This opened up the floodgates and I ended up writing three more letters to people in my past who have been instrumental on making me who I am today – both positively and negatively.

Only one of them got sent.

I decided to reconnect with the man formerly referred to as The Badass. Our breakup was not full of animosity; the timing simply wasn’t right and we eventually grew apart. It happens. Hell, it’s supposed to happen.

I wanted to tell him though how much I appreciated him and, years later, how much I respected his desire for adventure and freedom. He began the quarter-life crisis and the normal time, but instead of letting it fester for years, he took care of it then and figured out his life before he forced himself to become settled in the wrong direction.

Right now, he is my hero.

I eased into conveying all that emotion and took the time to get to know him again over the span of a few emails. We caught up on each other’s families and friends and talked about what we were doing now. We never talked about either’s romantic status, but I expect he is still with the woman who he met while getting over me (his words).

It didn’t really matter though; I eventually told him everything I needed to say and I think we’re at peace enough to continue on, not as friends, but as an old love who is a mere email away. And I feel good about it.

The other letters (i.e. emails) remain in various states of scripting. One is half-written, one is done and has been sitting in my drafts for weeks and the final one was deleted as soon as it was completed. I didn’t even re-read it. It said what I needed to get out, but that’s as far as it is going to go. Some things – people – in life just need to be deleted.

I obviously have not spent the entire last month writing letters though. That took a couple days, tops, and the rest of the time I have no other excuse for except I was simply too angry to write.

I have spent much of the last few weeks in a state of anger I am not familiar with, and not a fan of. I literally woke up in the mornings angry and annoyed about the day ahead and, throughout the course of it, the anger just got worse. I was quick[er] to get upset at other people and I spent the bulk of my time at work either bitching to equally frustrated co-workers or listening to Jay-Z through headphones so loud I’m sure my cubicle neighbors knew all about my 99 Problems. Unless I was with someone in my immediate circle, I wanted to be left alone because everyone else, quite frankly, pissed me off.

During this time, I also found myself finding excuses not to work out and not stick to what I knew I should be eating. All in all, it was a really shitty few weeks.

I finally began to snap out of it when I talked it over with a co-worker/BFF – we’ll call her Rudy because if you knew her, you’d know why – and learned she felt exactly the same way. I think it helped us both to admit the anger and how much we didn’t like feeling that way. Since then, she and I have separately made steps to figure out our new direction.

Our guidebook has become The Alchemist, an allegorical novel by Paulo Coelho first written in Portuguese and published in 1988. Rudy read it and came in raving about her newfound clarity. We all know I can’t resist a book that’s supposed to help decipher life, so I’m about 30 pages in and looking forward to reading more once I’m done writing this.

The book follows the journey of Santiago, a shepherd from Andalusia, who follows a prophetic dream about finding treasure amid the Egyptian pyramids (sidenote: are there other pyramids?). He encounters several people along the way, most notably an old king named Melchizedek who teaches about discovering his personal legend and following all the signs to get there.

This is about as far as I have gotten, but I am sucked in. There’s a part near the beginning when Santiago is talking about his irrational anger directed towards his sheep and that’s all it took. Dude, I got you.

So we’ll see where the book goes and how much I over-invest in it as the means to discovering my happiness.  Yep, I am fully aware of my tendency to do that.

In the meantime, I followed a few signs/cosmic hints/twitter invitations of my own.

I emailed a former boss who now is out in the Portland, Ore., area to give him my resume and asked him to keep me in mind if he heard of any opportunities out there. I also asked a colleague who I know is friends with someone who works at a company out there which I would LOVE to work for to “introduce” us formally (you know, by email).

So I’m taking some steps in the direction I want to be going, quite literally this morning as I went on a 5-mile hilly backcountry hike. The park association “tweeted” about the hike yesterday and I talked myself into going – love the outdoors, but self-conscious about trying new things alone – and I am so glad I did. I felt alive and inspired … and happy.

It helps the weather has been positively gorgeous for the last week and the Indian Summer, coupled with a reasonably light work schedule this weekend, may very well be the source of this happiness, but it’s honestly just a relief to not feel angry.

And now I’m going to go read The Alchemist. I have a personal legend to find.