Apr 12 2010

Here is my life defining list….what does your’s look like?

I had the chance to spend some time with friends celebrating the arrival of spring but I opted to spend some alone time reflecting, enjoying time with the big white pink eared dog and loving the beautiful weather.  I began to think about my past life and the defining life moments that have occurred that have molded me into who I am.  I thought it might be therapeutic to write the list in order to feel the full release and to define each individually.

This is my life defining list:
  1. Not staying in the car one time when I should have around the age of 4, I can’t explain the circumstances but Dad was pretty mad, that is what I remember most.  I guess this was all about right and wrong, obeying and disobeying.  It is too bad that the earliest moment I have is this unpleasant one but sometimes we don’t have a choice in the matter.
  2. Watching my dog Buffy die before my eyes after getting hit by a car at the age of 6 when an elderly man drove down the wrong dirt road looking for a friends house. To this day I feel sad thinking about what he must have felt watching a little girl scream hysterically trying to hold her dog as it died.  I am certain it hurt him more that it did me and that he probably re-lived that moment of sadness many times over.  I got another puppy a few weeks later and learned about life, death and how sometimes things can happen unexpectedly.
  3. Freezing up during cheerleading try outs my freshman year of high school.  I didn’t want to be a cheerleader but mom had hoped it for me, stage fright caused my mind to go blank and I just stood there embarrassed.  That episode drove me to take speech classes which eventually led me to a teaching degree in hopes of overcoming my fear of being in front of people.  When I moved to Nashville I helped host a writers night and made myself perform my music on stage thinking it would get easier in time.  To this day I have a tendency to go blank when I am extremely nervous and stage freight has never gone away for me, it is just as bad as it was way back when.  What I have realized is that it happens when I am singing or doing something I am uncomfortable with, I can stand in front of a room and talk photography all day with no fear.
  4. The last day I visited my grandma Pearl in the hospital before she died and coming back the next day not knowing she had passed only to find an empty bed.  She was one of the most amazing role models in my early life and I know there is a lot of her in me to this day.  At the age of 17 this was the first time I ever lost someone really close to me and it was huge.  I realized how fragile life is, what it felt like to loose someone close and that we have to cherish the time we have with those we love.  She often comes to mind when things happen that she warned me about back when I was too young to understand what she was saying to me as a child.  She was an amazingly wise woman and I know I still carry a part of her with me.
  5. Watching a best girlfriend slip out the bedroom window of a man I was in love with when I was 20. Packing my life on a whim and moving from the small town of Ocala, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia with a broken heart, broken spirit and not knowing a single person…one of the biggest life lessons and choices of my early adult life. The lesson on trust and love still resonates in me, the courage I found to change my life most definitely showed me how strong and independent I am as a woman.  This is where I changed from a girl to a woman!  I also learned to be forgiving with boundaries.
  6. My first year away from home at the age of 21 in a big city learning how to find work, to support myself, to make new friends and being over 600 miles away from my family for the first time in my life.  It was a huge life change, it was my initiation into adulthood and I became completely independent from my family for the first time.
  7. Moving back to Florida after being laid off from an amazing job in the photography industry and having a falling out with my roommate.  Experiencing broken dreams, finding myself homesick and starting my life over a second time within a year.  It was six months later when I met the man I would later call my husband.
  8. My wedding day, one of the most moving and emotional days of my life.  Even though we are no longer together it was the most amazing day of happiness AND stress I have ever experienced.
  9. After 9 years in the photography business, signing my first lease and opening my first photography studio.  It was one of the scariest yet most rewarding years I have ever had and I became a self employed business woman!
  10. The day I had my aha moment and realized I didn’t deserve to be verbally abused any more, it would lead me to closing my studio, getting divorced, packing everything I owned and walking away from the life I had known.  That time in my life showed me I had more courage than I ever thought existed and it would bring me to Nashville where I knew no one. It allowed me to re-invent who I wanted to be as a mature 35 year old adult.  It was the best life change to date and I have become happier and more content with who I am now than ever before in my past.
  11. Losing my grandma Seiler and attending her funeral.  She was another amazingly vibrant woman in my life and I feel so fortunate to have had her as a grandmother.  At the funeral I was brought back together and re-connected to my extended family who had been estranged due to a family feud more than 20 years prior.  Grannie Seiler had said to me once that she hated the fact that it would take her death to bring everyone back together, it is something she prayed for yet had the wisdom to know how it would play out.  It is sad that it takes a death to re-connect loved ones who are related to each other yet humbling that time can dissolve inner turmoil.  It is also sad that a death can also separate families due to selfishness and greed rather than love and compassion.  All of these experiences and emotions have made me a stronger more forgiving and loving person.
  12. Hearing the news that one of my early photography mentors had committed suicide and experiencing his loss.  He had visited me a few weeks before when passing through Nashville.  He had been dealing with the after math of a heart by-pass, had always suffered from severe depression and seemed to just want to talk that night.  I remember making him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sitting there watching him eat while he told me in his own way how proud he was of me.  He had watched me grow from a young 23 year old with no self confidence into a 40 year old successful business woman full of life.  This event taught me the seriousness of depression and how even if you give and show love to them they still feel alone and sad.  It also showed me how powerful the internet has become in our lives.  I posted a note on the back end of my myspace page about my memories, love and compassion for Rusty and it ranked in the top 5 google search for his name.  People who knew him from all over the country began contacting me about him and the words I posted.  His sister was so touched she read my words at the funeral with out my knowing she would do so.  I learned how easy it is to share with people in this day and age just by posting your thoughts and putting them out there.
  13. The choice I made to break up with a man I was deeply in love with because his drug and alcohol addiction was so bad I felt I could no longer do anything to help, I was feeling as if my emotional state was failing and that I had no other choice but to let him go.  Eight months later I would take the police to his home where they would find him dead of an overdose after being missing for 4 days.  I am still learning from this one, if you have read previous blogs you can see the struggles.  The biggest lesson is that substance abuse is serious, it is an awful thing to watch someone suffer with and there comes a point where you have to let them go if they don’t have the desire to help themselves hoping they will find the strength to do so.  It doesn’t get better with your showing that person more love, giving ultimatums or showing them anger.  They want to get better but often don’t have the strength to get outside help, they experience sadness, guilt and self hatred yet continue because at a certain point they no longer have control over the substance and/or they just don’t care.  They have to want to change you can’t make them change.  The toughest part of this life changing moment is that I set him free hoping it would help and often wonder could I have done more because the result was devastating.
These things are what resonate in me right now as my most pivotal life changing moments to date, why they ended on 13 I am not sure and definitely NOT superstitious.  I have omitted a few because they are too personal to share.  I know life is ever changing and there will be many more that lie ahead.  As I look back over this list I can see from an outsiders prospective it must look a little depressing because there seems to be many moments centered around death, break-ups and unhappy events.  All I can say is that maybe we get the most out of life during the worst of times because we have no other choice but to face the winds of change.  Perhaps it is with in those times that we have more strength and more courage than we ever thought we had because we feel we have no other choice. We begin to move in an uncomfortable forward direction taking each day as it comes because that is the only option that we have.  It is at those times that we need to be aware, where we end up will be based on our attitude. If we believe that life will get better and that we want something better we will start to do things from a positive place that will bring those positive things into our lives, if we believe life sucks then it will.
What does your list look like, maybe if you take the time right now to reflect you will learn more about how much you have grown as a person than you ever realized.  Writing my list down felt like a release, it reminded me how strong of a woman I really am because of the choices I made and where they took me.  It also reminded me how spiritual I have become and how important it is for me to pray and to be grateful.  The most important thing to remember is that we must be patient, that things will happen as they should and we need to feel these things as they happen no matter how painful or liberating.  Life is a journey through a kitchen of flavors…the best ones are those that are savored slowly and with love.  I plan to make mine as succulent and juicy as I possibly can, being patient knowing how good each bite will be makes it worth the wait!   Mmmm I’m hungry, how about you?

3 comments   |  tags: discovery, drugs, enlightenment, gratitude, growth, hurt, life, looking-back, loss, self, self-discovery, self-reflection | posted in life

Mar 30 2010

The roller coaster of life, death, religion and hell?

I started this blog years ago to share in hopes of helping people.  I have not figured out as of yet how to really get it out there and feel it touches very few people but still, I am here.  Although I often open myself up and share pretty deeply, there are things we all keep to our selves.  Things that no one, not even our closest friends or loved ones know of or quite possibly would even be able to understand.  I have posted things from my heart that people said I should not put out there because of what others would think.  I have said things that some believed I should remove because it would make others think of me in an undesirable way.  I have shared my thoughts and people have stated they thought I might need to seek professional help.  At the same time these things have gained praise, compassion and gratitude by others who’s emails have made me feel I am doing the right thing.  The truth is no matter what I share there will always be judgment of some kind.  As humans it is what we do and it is expected.  Although there are places I will not allow myself to share openly here, I feel there is some reason that little voice in my head keeps telling me to post what I am experiencing.

I believe that some people truly need help, that in-balance exist and that often prescribed drugs need to be taken.  I believe my high’s and lows are natural, that life is not always an upward plane and that at times we have to feel, to be humbled and to experience life.  If we are feeling pain yet know in our thoughts that it is supposed to be that way because that is the course of life I think we can keep things on track once we have the experience, regain our focus and then allow ourselves to move forward knowing it all leads to a better place.  I don’t want to hide, I don’t need to take some pharmaceutical drug a doctor thinks I need and I know that a bottle or recreational drug is not going to keep any painful thoughts from being experienced.  Numbing the experience is not going to make me a healthier person.  Life is our own journey, we set our path with each choice we make, we allow ourselves to place meaning on everything that comes into play and our thoughts determine our next move.  That being said no matter what, we are all going to hurt at times, we are all going to feel sad and sometimes…lost. We all experience health issues, break ups, broken hearts, broken friendships, losses and death.  At the same time if we look deeply into each of these things as they happen and allow ourselves to feel the hurt yet see what was also good in the experience we will eventually grow as an individual.  It is why people who have lost loved ones to tragedy often find a way to help others in need.  That those sad or seemingly negative experiences often lead to very uplifting and motivational publications, movies, businesses and organizations.  It is often what it takes in our lives to trigger something that helps us discover our purpose.

With all that was said above are you wondering what this post is actually about?  Well, I can’t say there is any one thing and although I honestly feel very happy with where I am in life for some reason at times I just feel a bit like a roller coaster (and I am getting really tired of some of you women blaming it on “THE CHANGE”).  This is life and lately my lower points happen when I see or remember something that reminds me of Todd.  I have never experienced the death of someone I have been intimate with, that I truly and deeply loved and that I feared would die because of their life style yet never believing it would actually happen.  Life is strange that way. I go through stages when it comes to Todd and lately he has been on my mind a lot.  I am wondering if maybe there are years of  emotional stages you go through when death has come in a tragic manner.  I think of him when I grab the remote, when I hear certain songs, drive by a certain place…there are things everywhere that make me think of him and not a single day goes by where he doesn’t filter through my mind.  Recently a friend gave me a jacket they had that was Todd’s, I went through all the pockets hoping I would find something he might have left, that he might have touched.  I didn’t want to but needed to wash it because it was extremely dirty, as I pulled it out of the dryer I couldn’t’ help but wonder what he had done the last time he wore it as tears fell down my cheeks.   I have been considering contacting some local establishments that deal with helping people who suffer from alcohol and drug addictions to offer my experiences with Todd and the reality of what can happen.  It would be a very difficult thing for me to do in person but I feel driven in some way to move in that direction.  Right now I am allowing my life to move forward on the ideas that come to mind and what I feel in my gut, this is one of them but I have yet to take action.

Several weeks ago I had a discussion about religion with a person I have not known for very long, we talked about Todd and some of the circumstances leading up to his death.  This person began to tell me in a polite yet Godly way that Todd more likely was not in Heaven, that he was in hell because of the sinful things he had done.  Now before I go on I will say that Religion and Politics are two things I don’t openly care to share or discuss, I feel we are all entitled to our choice in these areas and that judgment lies deeper in these two areas than any others.  That being said I have always admitted openly that I do believe in God and I am a spiritual person.  When this person made that statement it not only bothered me but it disturbed me.  I told the person they were entitled to their belief but I choose to believe differently and then ended the discussion.  I choose to believe that God does not punish, he loves, he forgives and he understands that as humans some of us are weaker than others.  It is not my place to judge other peoples actions, choices or where they end up, I don’t need to waist the energy on judgment of others I can only worry about my own actions.  I do have a choice in my thinking and what I choose to believe when it comes to Todd.  Todd was a wonderful loving person who also suffered from many painful things he could not overcome.  It has bothered me for several weeks now but in MY heart and mind Todd is in heaven and I know he will be there with a big grin on his face when it is my time to go.  I am not sure why I wanted to share that but I did want to get it off my chest and this seemed like the place to do it.

I realize this blog is a bit scattered in thought with this post but that is ok.  I am not trying to write a book, say something that will get me praise or earn friendships. I am just sharing and that isn’t something that should be proofread and edited a million times in hopes of pleasing everyone.  I love who I am, I love what I do, I love my family and friends and I feel very confident in my skin…I recently celebrated a birthday and I love that another year has allowed me to grow into the person I am right here…right now!  Love, love, love I can’t say the word enough, sending love out to all of you until next time!

2 comments   |  tags: addiction, blogging, death, discovery, drugs, enlightenment, God, growth, heaven, hell, hurt, life, loss, lost-love, love, religion | posted in life

Feb 14 2010

Feeling a little off on this “V” day but sending love…

I slept in today and that is not something that happens often.  I actually was awake but couldn’t (for some reason) bring myself to want to get out of bed.  Today is Valentines Day and all week leading up to today I have read post, received emails and talked to friends who were dreading the day’s arrival.   “Love Stinks” parties and “Single Valentines” events for those sad souls who are without a partner.  Those who are in relationships complaining how the hype makes the holiday expensive with limited restaurant menu’s and expensive price tags.  All this stress over a day focusing on “LOVE”.   Why  do we really need a day to remind us to be grateful and celebrate the one or one’s we love.  Everyday we should be showing love and for a day that was created for the sake of love it seems so many are stressed out and wanting it to pass as quickly as possible.

I am happy today, my dad’s birthday was yesterday, this week several of my friends are celebrating their b-days and I have wonderful people I love in my life.  Today I started my day with a kiss and a hug to my big white pink eared dog and a call to my mom to say happy “V” day and “I love you”.  Sure, it would be great to have someone special to celebrate the occasion with and in time I will be in that place but I won’t need a “specific” day to remind me show love to that special someone, it will be shown everyday.

So I have to admit although I have been happy all week, grateful for the busy work week and looking forward to a little quiet relaxation time I have felt a little off.  I have been aware of it but not sure what it was about.  I avoided people all weekend and enjoyed spending time at home alone watching cheesy movies about falling in love.  I often with draw, I enjoy being alone at times, I am not feeling depressed in any way so although I am not feeling sociable I feel happy overall.  Perhaps I feel a little off because I am trying to use less sugar in my diet and have felt a little out of sorts over the experience and the failures at times.  I though it was the reason I was feeling restless all week and having a hard time focusing.

As I become a healthier person in mind, body and spirit I am learning that often things trigger past events in our lives.  That no matter how positive or happy we are there will always be times of reflection that might feel painful yet need to be experienced.  I believe these events happen because we need to be reminded of who we are, where we have been and by believing that happiness lies with in our own minds we keep moving forward.  These events are reminders for us to see the beauty in all things, good or bad, and to live life feeling and growing rather than being numb to the process.  More often than not if we keep a positive mind set and believe these events are there to help us grow we will see something beautiful on the other side from the experience.  Individually, for each of us this is our very own road of life, we make the decisions where and when to turn so we must live with where ever we end up!  I choose to be happy no matter where I land.

The truth is that Todd has been on my mind a lot this week and I think maybe Valentines is the trigger.  I have had some dreams of him, I have been missing him and I am sad that he is gone.  I never watch tv and this week found myself watching an episode of Celebrity Rehab, connecting so much with what was happening in the episode especially with the drama. For those of you who are new to my post, Todd passed away a year and a half ago of a drug overdose.  I dated him for two years prior and was unaware of his issues, after a year of dating and then moving in together I realized he had an addiction.  I tried to get him help and eventually had to break up with him because I could no longer handle his addiction.  It was a tough decision because I loved him dearly but I could no longer deal with the events that the drug and alcohol addiction had created in our lives, he died eight month later.  I have never been into drugs, I don’t even like to take aspirin and other than drinking alcohol on occasion I prefer to feel in control of my body, my mind and my actions.  I am very nieve to the habits and characteristics drugs create because I have no knowledge of what they do internally nor how they make you feel.  Now days everyone seems to be taking pharmaceutical drugs….personally I think these might be worse than any of the ones I knew about when I was younger.  The bottom line is that losing someone you love is tough especially when it is sudden and unexpected, it takes time to heal and although it gets easier over time things do resurface.  You do repeat the grieving process and remember the person who is no longer living.

Todd has been on my mind, although I have been happy this week there has been a slight unknowing sadness or feeling of being off.  I realized this morning while lying in bed that three years ago Todd had given me a beautiful saffire ring (not an engagement ring) for valentines, it was one of the most memorable and happy valentines I can remember ever having.

So here I am not sure why I am writing today but wanting to say something to lift my spirits and yours, at least those of you who may be feeling a bit down on this day of recognizing “LOVE”.  What I can say is this…I am ever so grateful that even though Todd has passed I had the opportunity to love him, to be loved by him knowing he loved me the best he could in light of his addiction and realizing that in life there are no guarantees.  We must remember to show our love to all those who are important to us, lovers, friends, family and even strangers.  Life is a constant learning platform with up’s and downs.  At times things may not seem fair, bad things do happen but the ability to think positive even when you might not be feeling it will make all the difference in your life and in being happy.

Love comes in many forms, kindness is the greatest and it is within all of us, it is free and always available to give. Today I am grateful for every single thing in my life.  Thinking of all those unfortunate people in Haiti and what they are having to endure makes me that much more grateful and makes me want to give more because I have the ability to do so.  Today I celebrate “Valentine Day” buy saying to all of you…those I know and those I do not, “I love you” for being who you are, for reading this and for being in my life.  Sending love out to everyone….until next time!  SMOOCH!!!!

no comments   |  tags: addiction, being single, dating, discovery, drugs, enlightenment, finding-happiness, growth, life, looking-back, loss, lost-love, love, relationships, romance-relationships, self-discovery, self-reflection, Valentines Day | posted in life, love

Dec 4 2008

Three Parts Wonder = One Part ME

The loss of my dog, the loss of my lover from drugs, a sick family member and the wonder of it all.

Click to continue reading “Three Parts Wonder = One Part ME”

no comments   |  tags: addiction, drugs, enlightenment, family, health, life, loss, love, lovers, Pets, self-reflection, wonder | posted in life

Nov 10 2008

Todd Garrett I will always love you…RIP

He was a very big part of my life. He was a lover, a companion, a roommate and a best friend. Todd Garrett I will always love you and I will only remember the good things. RIP

Click to continue reading “Todd Garrett I will always love you…RIP”

no comments   |  tags: addiction, best-friends, death, drugs, hurt, life, loss, lost-love, lover, relationships | posted in life