Mitzi’s Happy

It’s been three years of being on my own, and many more before that where I was living life without a partner, although we were in the same house. It was today that I was driving to work and out of the air, I could see and feel the words “It wasn’t your fault.”

It took this long, this amount of time trying to figure out what happened. Trying to place events and trying to reach out into the void and rationalize what happened, and what I did.

And today, something has changed, and I can accept that it wasn’t my fault. I’m not interested in sharing details, but what I can share is that the things that happened, happened, and then it ended, and that’s all. There’s nothing that I did that made it end, and I didn’t control what happened in the middle, it ended and I’m not taking responsibility for it anymore.

I’m Glad of This:

I’m glad that I’ve had this time to be on my own. I would have given everything at one point to have found my person, like I did give everything once. Had someone come around in the last three years that could have made a place in my life, I probably would have accepted that. But I have a lot of things to work out and needed or need to work that out without someone else. There have been some hard internal struggles as I unraveled what I could piece together, and as I’ve put myself together, I’m different. Alone, I’ve had the chance to think and recollect and move forward in my way and in my own time.

And there are days where I am profoundly alone. Times when grief overwhelms me so much that all I can do is embrace it. To be clear, it’s not the grief of losing him, it’s the grief of having lost myself for so long. (Have I stressed enough that none of this is about him?)

I never had him, I only lost me.

I Did do This:

I’ve learned to embrace the times that I am breaking because it forces something to heal, even a little bit. The times that my brain is fighting itself is exhausting, and usually in the quiet spaces of late night when I just need to sleep. I’m trying to embrace waking up the next day, winning the match because I got up and went to work. Only someone who has truly battled themselves for a night can understand the physical exhaustion of keeping yourself together enough to get through it. Those people will understand the heaviness of life the next day when life continues, and you have to find the energy to move first out of bed and then into the routine things that need to be done. Sometimes you make choices of which of those items you complete because you can’t do them all.

Embracing instead of accepting that it’s not likely that I’m meant to be a part of a pair is allowing me to live life more of a life out loud. Embracing rather than hiding that given my hair, height, weight, experiences, even my name – all of which fall outside of the bell curve of normalcy- I’m going to stand out and it’s weird to hang back. I embrace the part of me that only saw the good in people and literally didn’t have the vocabulary to understand that there are people in the world that I need to protect myself from.

I am working at getting that part of me back though- the person who believes that everyone is inherently good. I’m approaching it differently this time – everyone is inherently good, but believe them when they show you who they are at the present.

So the goals now is to live each day with a love of life and no expectations. That’s it, pretty simple.