Get Off My Lawn, Kids

I must be getting old. Like... seriously, I've officially reached the point where the way "kids today" go about existing on Planet Earth baffles me as badly as I'm sure my own lifestyle and value system baffled my parents or grandparents. 

I think the weirdest thing to me is the going attitude toward relationships today. It honestly seems as if everyone under the age of 50 considers an open relationship to be the way to go. Like it's some kind of punishment to be expected to actually be faithful to your mate. I've even heard people saying that they think it's abusive and selfish not to be OK with it if your partner wants to sleep with other people. 

Now... I've been the last thing from perfect in some of my past relationships. I've cheated on people before. I'm even relatively open about the fact that my relationship with Seth started while I was still married to Greg. However, I never actually saw that behavior as something that should be socially acceptable or that my exes should have freely allowed me to do. Ultimately, I wanted to be with someone that was not only 100% faithful to me, but that kept me happy enough for me to want to be the same. I fought for it and searched for it until I found it and it's amazing to know that I have another person that belongs to just me and that I belong to in return. I honestly feel bad for anyone that's willing to settle for anything short of that. That isn't a relationship at all as far as I'm concerned.

Writing Lab: On Work Life Balance

Prompt: "Do you think you have a decent work/life balance?"

BlogHer's Writing Lab was so helpful to me last month that I think I'll continue responding to prompts now and then as we make our way into 2016. I may even start writing posts ahead of time and scheduling them to auto-post at later dates the way I used to. When I get in the mood to blog, I often feel like writing more than one post, but I don't always feel like updating more than one of my individual sites at a time. 

On that note, I can definitely see I'll have plenty to say about this month's theme -- balance. The tradition one kind of covered foreign territory for me, but I feel like my entire life has been about learning to understand balance and set appropriate boundaries, both for myself and for other people. This has especially been the case when it comes to my professional life.

I am about the furthest thing there is from a workaholic and I've always been that way. I very definitely believe in working to live, not living to work. When I'm working too much, I'm irritable and upset all the time. If I'm too stressed or too overworked for too long, I can also get incredibly sick -- mentally and emotionally, as well as physically. That said, achieving and maintaining a healthy work/life balance is of the utmost importance to me. It's also been easier said than done for most of my life.

Writing Lab: Exploring the Concept of Tradition

When I first decided to participate in regards to this month's Writing Lab theme, there was a part of me that thought it would be pointless for me to even bother. As I've touched on in previous posts, I've always felt kind of left out for one reason or another when other people are talking about their traditions, especially around the holidays, so I was worried that I'd have nothing of interest to say.

I don't feel like my family situation was like other people's, not when I was growing up and not as an adult. I'm not really even in touch with most of my family members at this point in time. Don't get me wrong. It's definitely for the better because some of the people in question are incredibly toxic, but the holidays always have a way of making you aware of what's missing in your life. Both things you used to have, but no longer do, and things that you've frankly never had in any form even if you thought differently at some point in the past.

I've since been working on making the holidays my own. Being with someone that I feel truly enjoys my company and accepts me for who I am has helped a lot. I don't know that I would have felt comfortable using the word "tradition" to describe any of what we do though. Or at least I wouldn't have before I was challenged to take a closer look at what it really means to have traditions in the first place. Even on the days when I elected not to write a response to the day's prompt for whatever reason, I still read it and considered it. That turned out to be a really positive thing for me.