When You Decide………..

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One of my favorite scenes in a movie is in a movie that I have not even seen. Yet it is passed from one person to another over and over again on Facebook. The movie “Rocky Balboa” (2006) where Rocky and his son Robert are standing out in the street and Rocky says “Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”
― Sylvester Stallone, Rocky Balboa

Life has hit me hard, but I am still moving forward. I am not perfect, I won’t ever claim to be. I make mistakes and I will make many more. Yet I am learning that writing is something that for someone like me has become air. I have a dependant personality. It was only 11 months ago that I would struggle to make major decisions and most of the time I would let my husband make them. I trusted him and he was an excellent leader of our family. We had a savings, we had retirement, we had a solid life. It is his planning that allowed us to make it through his death the three months we had to with very little income. If I disagreed with a decision that he made I said nothing for fear of upsetting the harmony of our family. Believe it or not, that is a part of a dependant personality.

For the last 11 months I have had to step into the leadership of the family. I have made what I think has been some very good decisions and I am proud of the way I have handled things. Though mentally it has been the hardest thing I have ever done. I have learned that my knee jerk reaction was to quickly find someone else to help with that burden. Yet in the past month I have learned that I can take that burden on myself and do well on my own. Not that it is any less scary, but what it is doing is giving me this self confidence that I have never had. I can figure this out, I can find the same balance that Ed taught me. Because he was a teacher, he didn’t just do the things he taught me to do them too. Yes it is stressful and I have to have a million reminders on my phone. But they work and things are running smoothly. And I can crawl into bed and thank God for the day and be ready for the next.

I use to think that I had a very weak personality. No, I just didn’t have self confidence, and some people say well just get some. That’s like telling someone that is mentally ill to “just feel better.” It takes work, very uncomfortable work. Work that most of the time most of us would just rather avoid. Yet there are times in life when we are just forced to face ourselves. It is not pretty because we tend to focus on the faults that we don’t like and we end up feeling even worse about ourselves. It is then that we must realize that those things that we don’t like can be changed. It is just seeing that a change will take time, but in the end you will feel better. It is also taking time to list all the things you love about yourself, and remember that what you see is a problem others may not and visa versa. If you are going to go through the mess of changing, and yes it is a fucking mess and it can hurt emotionally, make sure the change is for you it is the only way to make sure it sticks.

Life is hard and it will knock you down, but forward is the only way to go.

Dee