The Making of an Epiphany

Well, once again I find myself sitting here on my bed typing to all of you when I really should be working.  I have a half finished quilt sitting on my sewing machine, waiting to be completed, but it is just going to have to sit there a bit longer.  I find myself still fighting that funk that has been lingering around me lately, and I am not sure what to do to make it vacate my brain. 


It has come to my attention that I have been doing entirely too much thinking lately and I really need to fucking stop it.  I guess maybe my impending 45th birthday is having more of an effect on my psyche than I wanted to believe.  I mean, I am totally cool with getting older, I have no issue with my age, I have too many friends who were denied the privilege of seeing 45, I know how lucky I am.  But I think I may be experiencing the beginning stages of a mid-life crisis, and I am not happy about it.

I have this overwhelming sense that my life is more than half over, and while I will stand tall in defense of how I spent my life so far, the future is starting to scare the shit out of me.  Honestly, I never had time to worry about the future before.  I was too busy raising kids and trying to figure out how to feed them and keep them safe TODAY, tomorrow always had to wait its turn to be worried about.  Now, suddenly the future is staring me head long in the face, and it seems to be saying : "You are so screwed".

I know what I need to do.  I need to quit beating myself up and start trying to support myself, in more ways than just financially.  I need to start acting like my own best friend.  It just dawned on me that while I have always claimed to be my own best friend, since I didn't have any others, I sure have never acted like much of a friend to myself.  I wouldn't take this shit from somebody else, why the fuck do I do it to myself?  I think this is what they call an "epiphany".  A thousand little light bulbs just went off in my head, my gawd woman you are a freakin genius!  A little slow on the uptake perhaps, but a genius none the less.   Instead of looking for a friend outside myself when I really don't have time for one anyway, I need to be nurturing the one friend that has always put up with my insanity, me.

I am not sure why it has taken me this long to see it.  I guess I wasn't ready to admit it before.  I thought just not treating myself like crap was doing pretty good, it never really dawned on me that I could actually be supportive of myself.  I guess the fear of being narcissistic has probably held me back, and that is probably a good thing.  I do tend to take things to extremes.  But just how do I go about being my own best friend without being self-obsessed?  I can see this is going to take some work to figure out.  But it does make me feel better to have a more defined issue to work out.  I have been feeling rather trapped lately and I couldn't figure out how to break out of the trapped feeling without destroying my life.  Maybe this is the key I have been searching for..  I have always known when my thought processes were flawed, but I have never been able to figure out how to correct them before, now I think I have an idea.  Thank You internet people!  Without all of you to ramble aimlessly at I am not sure I would have ever made this observation about myself.  And I am pretty sure I am going to continue to ramble aimlessly at you a lot more in the coming weeks as I try to learn a whole new way of thinking about myself.  So buckle up, this is bound to be a bumpy ride!