The Sunset of Another Year

I can't believe Christmas is on Tuesday, nor does it seem possible that it's nearly time to say good-bye to yet another year. My relationships to both my biological and extended families are strained at best (where they're existent at all), so the holidays always bring up some weird feelings for me. However, this year I also have this wonderful feeling of accomplishment to help balance some of that.

I'm realizing that at one point, I got pretty used to feeling like a fuck-up. Every December usually finds me painfully aware of the fact that yet another year has slipped by without my accomplishing anything of note. Anything to be proud of. Nothing I've done to make my life better or truly move forward toward any of the long-term goals I like to claim are so important to me.

But not this year. This year, I can look back on a year I spent diligently improving myself. I've been exercising every day. I've been eating well. I've been taking amazing care of myself, both inside and out. I've been learning, reading, praying, and worshiping. (I am learning German, among other things!) I feel beautiful, and confident, and strong. I can honestly say I am finally growing into a woman I am proud to be and cultivating an image I'm unashamed to show to the rest of the world, either casually or in regards to something that's more serious.

Take last weekend, for instance. I've sort of made friends with one of our Instacart shoppers over Facebook recently and she asked to meet me in person last Saturday. (Normally I do the shopping and handle the orders, but Seth gets the door for the shopper in the event the delivery includes alcohol and needs to be signed for.) I'll probably never be the most voluntarily social person in the world, but it was really nice not to feel like I literally can't show my actual face to anyone because I've let my weight, hygiene, and grooming routine slide too far out of control for too long. Despite wearing boxer shorts and absolutely zero make-up, I felt like a normal human being saying hello to a friend who wanted to see me and that was really nice for a change.

On Transformations, Pride, and Self-Love

It looks like Blogger finally got around to purging the old, extraneous blogs I deleted a few months ago. I certainly wasn't planning on reviving them or anything, but it still feels a little bittersweet to actually see that they're really and truly gone. With them go the fractured little pieces of me that they contained back when I was still not really sure who I was or what I wanted to be going forward.

To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure, but I do know I no longer have the time or energy to try to be all things to all people. I like that there is really only one of me these days. I'm still the reader, and the writer, and the lover, and the passionate home cook, and the closet spiritualist. I'm just all of those things at the same time now. It feels like a right proper place to be. Grounded, stable, and lots of other words I never would have used to describe myself a few years ago.

My phone's image gallery is full of selfies these days. I don't even share most of them with anyone else, but I consider it a very good sign that I've felt moved to take them at all. Historically speaking, I photograph things I'm proud of or pleased by. If I'm taking pictures of myself, that must mean I've reached a place where I feel proud of how I look again. I'm certainly proud of how well I've been taking care myself so far this year. My fit body and my beauty were things I never fully appreciated the last time I actually had them, so it's nice to feel the way I imagine other people would feel about those things. I love the ways I've been changing and I get excited every time I realize that things will only get better from here.

On Red Hair, Glamour, and Anne of Green Gables

I finally got around to coloring and styling my hair a couple weeks back. I decided I wanted to take advantage of actually having virgin hair to work with again (for the first time in a very long time), so I switched things up from the really super bright shade of red I was doing previously. I chose a shade from L'Oreal's Power Reds collection, a coppery color that reminded me of fox fur -- a color found in nature, but still nice and bright. I had to dye it twice to get the level of lift I was after, but it ultimately came out exactly the way I wanted.

I invested in some new cosmetics recently and signed up for a couple of beauty subscriptions, as I want to get back in the habit of taking care of my skin and doing my make-up on a regular basis as well. It's been really fun so far, trying some new products and learning how to put together some different looks. I don't necessarily see the need to get all made up every day, as sometimes I just really like to sit around with a bare face, but I no longer see the point in saving my efforts for days I plan to go out or be around people either. I probably do my make-up more days than I skip it altogether though. I want maintaining my hair, face, and nails to one day feel like an essential part of my ongoing routine just like working out and watching what I eat have become.

I even took a few selfies the day I finished my hair so I could update the profile pictures on all my social media pages. Sometimes I'm really at a loss to explain why I don't take or allow more pictures of myself, because I rarely dislike the way I look in photos if they're taken properly. I'm honestly looking pretty good for an old broad in her 40's, even if I do say so myself. And the longer I stick with all the positive changes I've been making lately, the better I'll continue to look and feel going forward. I'm definitely going to keep looking for ways to stay excited about that, hopefully indefinitely. I think I'm off to a really good start and am super proud of all the progress I've made this year.

Of Eclipses, Loss, and Transformation

This month has been a tad rough, spiritually speaking. We've got this massive blood moon lunar eclipse coming up in a couple of days here on the 27th and it's had me feeling some kind of way. I've definitely been having one of those months where staying upbeat and excited about life in general seems a bit harder than usual. The same sticking points and problems I always have in my life have seemed more daunting somehow and the things that normally make it better have been less effective for no real reason. Typical me when something odd is going on with the moon.

It hardly helps that a friend of mine died in a truly horrific way last Thursday night. Her name was Angela Coleman and she lived in Indianapolis. She and pretty much her entire family were involved in the Branson, Missouri duck boat accident that's been in the news lately and the great majority of them died -- 9 out of the 11 Colemans that were on the boat.

Angela was an online friend of mine, so I only knew her but so well, but we talked relatively often. I converse with so few people these days, so I think it's fair to say she was one of my closer social media friends. We shared a lot of interests, particularly food and cooking. She signed up for ButcherBox because of how excited I'd always get about receiving and cooking with the things they sent. We traded recipe ideas often and even her son, Donovan, was getting into cooking. She was also a total "take no shit" type of person just like I am, so we bonded over general life stuff a lot too. She was most certainly someone I was always excited to hear from and talk to. She'd even gotten to know Seth over the years, so he knew her as well.

June Musings in Triplicate

The Treachery of Images - Rene Magritte (1928-29)

As always, time continues to fly without my apparently noticing, but for once it's not necessarily a bad thing. In just a little over a week, I'll have reached my six-month milestone as far as my decision to improve my health goes. Six months of mindful eating with intermittent fasting. Six months of working out every single weekday without fail. I've lost close to 40 pounds since New Year's Day, so I'm about where I hoped I'd be with my weight loss journey by halfway through the year. I've been building muscle, strength, and stamina. A couple of weeks ago, I also started wearing a latex waist trainer when I work out to help support my abs and encourage my waist to tighten up a little bit -- another little something that's been helping me make steady progress toward my goals.

At this rate, I expect to be very happy with where I'm at by the end of the year. Two years from now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I'm actually able to look in the mirror without seeing a single thing I don't like about my body composition. That will be absolutely amazing, as I haven't been able to say I like my body in many years. I've never been able to say I'm 100% happy with it, so that's something I'm looking forward to for sure, especially since I'm in my 40's now. I'll take my ego boosts where I can get them.

This is hardly just a vanity thing for me though. Everything that's been going on with my mother over the past year has really changed my attitude toward self-care and fitness. She's taken terrible care of herself pretty much the entire time I've been alive. She's always been as lazy and sedentary as her responsibilities would allow her to be. She's very overweight and has a terrible relationship with food. For a long time, she had just as terrible a relationship with alcohol as well. I honestly always just thought of that as her business until she ran her health into the ground to the point where she couldn't really take care of herself anymore.

On Royal Weddings, Birds, and Shifting Social Tides

Last Friday, Seth and I stayed up late to watch CNN's live footage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle getting married. I'm so very glad we did. I've casually followed the lives of the British royals since I first saw Diana and Charles get married as a little girl, so naturally I was interested in seeing their boys get married too. I watched them be born and grow up, after all, so -- like many people -- I guess I feel like I know them a little bit. Plus, Seth and I already watched the live footage of Prince William and Kate Middleton getting married years ago and had a wonderful time.

Harry has always been my favorite of the two princes though, so I was especially interested in seeing him sort of find someone eventually and settle down. Imagine how thrilled I was when he chose someone not only smart and poised, but biracial as well. Being biracial myself, that really means something to me. I was born in the 70's, so I very definitely grew up with the message that girls like me don't get to be princesses. We certainly were never considered pretty, or desirable, or noteworthy, so it's been quietly blowing my mind a little bit that I can actually recognize myself in the face of one of the British royals -- something I really didn't think would ever happen. Yes, there are still plenty of bigots out there that think we mixed girls (Meghan Markle included) ain't shit, but they can't change the fact that this is just huge.

At any rate, watching that wedding was just what I needed, so haters be damned. Some people really seem to get something out of feeling miserable all the time and focusing on everything that's wrong with the world we live in, but I don't. As melancholy and depressed as I can get from time to time, I always choose happiness, and cheer, and optimism as often as it makes sense to, so it was really nice to spend an entire evening thinking about gorgeous white flowers, and crazy English church hats, and a beautiful mixed girl marrying the best prince for a change. 

On Inner Peace and Progress

Every so often, it occurs to me that I'm actually a lot more satisfied with myself and my life than I tend to think I am most of the time. It's pretty much impossible to sell me things I don't really want or need and I don't fall for the same bullshit schemes other people seem to lap up just like it's mother's milk. I don't wish I was a different person or dream of living a radically different life one day. Not anymore. There's definitely always room for improvement, of course, but I'm also pretty content with who I am and with how I fill my days. Anything I'm not currently satisfied with is either temporary or something I'm actively working to change for myself.

My recent disenchantment with so many of my old friends has found me trying to make some new ones that share some of my current interests and values. I found a few Facebook groups to join and contribute to that seemed promising. I've also been attempting to actually talk to people that seem personable. As a result, I've had a few superficial "let's get to know each other" chats with some new folks I've met and I've noticed something about the way I speak about myself and my life. I speak with confidence and pride about my accomplishments, my relationship, and the person I've worked hard to become. That's a far cry from how I used to talk about myself in the now distant past -- very carefully, as I was constantly worried that the truth of my life would seem as pathetic to other people as it did to me.

The Angelus

The Angelus - Jean-François Millet (1857-59)

That painting there -- Millet's The Angelus -- is one of my favorites right now, as it makes me think of the head space I'm in these days and all of the things that are positive about it. To begin with, it depicts a couple that not only works together, but prays together, taking a moment to bow their heads for the Angelus at dusk. They're hard-working farmers that work the land, not fancy folks that live easy lives. They work hard for everything they have, but it's a good life they live and it's one they never forget to thank God for. 

When I look at that painting, I see the standard I'm aspiring to, both on my own and within the context of my relationship. My ideal life with Seth looks like that life. In fact, I think I've made a decision. Whenever I get around to fixing up my desk area and making it work-friendly again, I think I'd like to buy a framed print or canvas of The Angelus and replace the nondescript print of my mother's that's currently hanging over my desk. At one point, I thought I'd replace it with a piece of my own art, but I think this is much more appropriate for where I'm currently at in my life.

It's amazing how differently I process the passage of time when I feel like I'm being consistent about  doing something good for myself. For instance, it's now the second day of May. At my current age, time has a way of zipping by at what honestly feels like a breakneck pace sometimes and the start of yet another month normally finds me feeling disappointed in myself because of how little progress I made as far as moving my life forward over the month before. This year has been different because of the way I've stuck by my decision to make exercise a regular part of my life. 

Out with the Old, In with the New

Every so often in life, I appear to arrive at a kind of... social crossroads, for lack of a better way to describe it. At first, I just find I have trouble relating to my friends groups to the same extent I once did. Then I start noticing myself becoming actively irritated with individual members of those groups, usually because something they do, say, or think seems immature or unreasonable on one level or another. Then one day I just wake up in a state of active disgust with nearly everyone I know from that group and just want to be permanently rid of most of them.

That gradual process of disillusionment is what eventually caused me to realize I'd outgrown the friends I'd had throughout my teenage years, as well as most of my core family. It's what made me want to jettison myself from the online art community years ago, not to mention cut ties with almost everyone that even remembered I used to make digital art. Now it's officially happened with that group of LiveJournal people I used to be so tight with. I'm just sick to death of how petty, and gossipy, and childish they all are.

These are feelings I'd been aware of for quite some time. However, the whole David incident was what really dragged them out into the open. I'm not the sort of person that takes kindly to another person's decision to ignore my wishes and just hop right over any boundaries I might have set, but that's exactly what David eventually decided to do. Right after I removed and blocked him on every social media platform I could think of, he went out of his way to track me down and tweet me on Twitter, the one place I'd forgotten he had an account and failed to enforce a block. Then at some point yesterday, I got another message from him basically begging for another chance at friendship. I had previously responded to the tweet with a brief explanation as to why I didn't want to be friends anymore, but I didn't dignify yesterday's follow-up message with a response at all. I'm only going to tell you once.

On Growing Up and Its Consequences

So I cut ties with a couple of friends this week. Sadly, it seems that the more of my own issues I resolve and the more growing up I do, the more I start to see some of my so-called friends for the losers, eternal victims, and rotting garbage people that they are. As far as how I feel about that? On the one hand, I'm really pleased to realize I've grown enough as a person to finally assess such situations accurately. But for someone that really hasn't had many close friendships to begin with, growing up can also be a really lonely process. I definitely feel like I lose friends these days at a much faster rate than I make new ones.

This time, the people in question were a middle-aged male friend I'd known online for years and his female partner of about a year whom I was only just getting to know. (We can call them David and Terri for the sake of this post.) David is of the age where people that haven't really taken very good care of themselves over the course of their lives start having serious health scares and something to that exact tune finally happened to him maybe a month or two ago. He's also been struggling with some pretty serious depression and anxiety lately, some of it probably related to the health scare and some of it not.

Now David has always been a little bit stunted as a person. Like many people I've known online, he sees and presents himself as one thing when actually he's another. (No real judgment on that front. We've all been there, including me. Hell, especially me.) Like many people in that boat though, he claims to tell it like it is and to be all about brutal honesty, but only when he's the one dishing it out. When someone else is serving it up -- even if it's someone he claims to respect -- he handles it with all the grace and dignity of a toddler. That's not actually the reason I cut ties with him though. That happened because I decided I could no longer tolerate the way he treats people, particularly his partners. 

On Figurative Spring Cleaning

I don't know where the time goes, but it's definitely that time of year again. Lent is over with. Easter has come and gone. The weather is warming up and Seth has officially had to add tending the lawn to his rotating to-do list again because it's green and actively growing. I'm busy managing my business as my clients begin to make their usual post-tax season plans for their content needs. Collectively, we're starting to think about the warmer months and the different possibilities they bring with them.

As far as how I'm doing personally, I'm happy to report that I'm still doing an A+ job of keeping up with the workouts I promised myself I'd stay serious about way back in January. When I first started, I don't know that I expected to see much of a difference in how I looked or felt after only three months, but I've been pleasantly surprised. I've lost a few pounds for sure. I'm also feeling stronger, healthier, and just better all around. A lot of the issues I simply blamed on getting older before have even noticeably improved (i.e. less energy, lower moods, and lower sex drive) much to my great relief. I feel a lot less "old" as a result.

I've been feeling a lot more motivated in regards to other things as well. Just knowing I'm being proactive about my health and watching my physical state start to move in the right direction as a result has helped me with my depression and made me feel more optimistic about certain things. Knowing that I'll only continue to get slimmer, and healthier, and more comfortable in my own skin has found me getting excited about maybe actually "doing things" again in the near future -- going places, working on personal projects, and -- most importantly -- actually recording my life again. My thoughts, my experiences, and my adventures.

On January and Self-Improvement

So this year I decided to give some of that "New Year, new me" thinking the old college try (instead of just making fun of other people for doing it). Surprisingly, it's actually working out so far. Sometime around Halloween, Seth and I decided we were getting really tired of being so out of shape, so we bought some exercise equipment. Nothing super fancy -- just a stationary bike, a Gazelle Edge, and a set of resistance bands to start with -- things we could realistically picture ourselves using on a regular basis. Then after New Year's, I started working out. Not just "whenever" either. I actually came up with a consistent schedule that I've been sticking to. 

Monday through Friday I've been doing 30 minutes of cardio right when I get up before work or anything else has a chance to demand my ongoing attention. In addition to that, I've been doing some very basic strength training on Tuesdays and Thursdays after my cardio. Although my eating habits have honestly been pretty decent lately, I've been more mindful in that arena as well. Just the usual things -- watching my portions, cutting back on empty calories, and eating as much fresh produce as possible. Most mornings, I've also been taking the time to eat at least a small breakfast -- usually just toast and fruit with coffee, but sometimes an egg or some deli meat and cheese on an English muffin if I'm hungrier. 

The idea wasn't to drop a million pounds as quickly as possible the way it normally is when I think about fitness, but to actually come up with something sustainable I could see sticking with permanently. I don't want to do what I've watched my mother do the entire time I've been alive -- let her health and quality of life slide downhill until she eventually reached a point where she probably couldn't do much about it even if she wanted to. When I'm her age, I want to be healthy, happy, comfortable in my own skin, and living my best life. I guess I realized that if that's going to happen, I need to get the ball rolling toward some positive change and it seems to be working so far.