Icebreaker
Hi everybody!
I believe that doing the things that scare you makes your world larger and makes you a stronger and more resilient person. And I tell my children that if they don’t embarrass themselves at least once a day, they’re not trying hard enough. And that, in a nutshell, is why I decided to join Toastmasters and start a blog.
I have not always lived according to these two aspirations.
Two years ago, I was happily married and back from a blissful family vacation in Cancun, enjoying the newly remodeled kitchen my husband had installed in our North Park home. These were the two most romantic things he had ever done for me. Before this, it was the compost pit and raised garden beds.
And then, two months later in September, when my husband came back from his annual 10-day solo trip to the desert lake bed of Black Rock City, home of the anarchistic and hedonistic camp known as Burning Man, he told me he was “done” and he didn’t think he wanted to be married anymore.
After 13 weeks of marriage counseling, I discovered the girl 18 years younger than me that he had met at Burning Man, and who became his incessant texting partner. He texted Burning Ho every 15 minutes and they sent picture messages to each other before they went to bed. That’s when I knew it was over.
As the mostly stay-at-home mom to two kids, it was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me, but I found an apartment, wrote a separation agreement based on the Nolo Big Book of Divorce, and moved out.
As anyone who has been through a tragedy can tell you, this is when you find out who your friends are. And my friends turned out to be:
- People who donated rugs and bunkbeds
- Women who showed up with their own power tools ready to assemble Ikea furniture
- A personal trainer who gave me an external hard drive to download any evidence that could be found on my ex’s computer
- And friends and coworkers who never stopped asking me how I was doing even after they had been cried on many times in a row.
But then a funny thing happened.
With 50% custody and a new apartment, I had more time and space to myself than I had had in a decade and I started to have hobbies again. I pursued all of the things that bothered my ex or hobbies that he didn’t share and I acquired a wine collection, floral bedding, and I started eating pork bacon again. I took up old and forgotten hobbies like sketching and playing flute. And my single coworker friends guided me through the online dating process where I found a thousand questions that I didn’t know the answers to anymore, if I ever had.
I needed to work on finding my voice. It was a deficiency that I had never fixed from long ago and now seemed like the time to do it. I took myself to therapy and started to figure out what was really true. And I gave myself singing lessons for my birthday, which has since grown into my ukulele playing.
I think that finding my voice is the secret to figuring out my future and developing my next career,so this post is my next step.
In any case, I have for today fulfilled my requirements for doing something scary and embarrassing myself. Thank you for reading and hanging out with me.
