A year of living fabulously

Friday marked my one-year anniversary of being unemployed, disenfranchised and a general ne'er-do-well. In other words, life is sweet.

Such milestones don't come around very often, so I'll take this chance to recap some of the highlights from the past year. To wit:

June 15, 2005: I had my last day of work, having been summarily rejected by Corporate America. They told me my department was being reorganized, and they did actually do that. But I like to think that the rejection was also personal. I simply did not fit in, and that was always abundantly clear. ... Several months after they let me go, they realized *someone* needed to be doing the stuff I was doing, and they hired a low-level writer to replace me.

June 16: I celebrate my first day of freedom by going up to Battleground Lake for a swim. The water is a little chilly, being too early in the summer. But I have this great moment where, walking down to the beach there, I see dozens of people basking in the sun, and I say to The Good Witch, There sure are a lot of people here in the middle of the week. She turns to me, smiles, waves her hand outward in introductio and says, "Welcome to the leisure class."

June and July: I spend the next six weeks having coffee out on the patio in the mornings, fiddling around with the landscaping, going to the lake, refinishing the outdoor furniture, going to the lake, shopping for furniture for the home office, walking the dogs a LOT and making arrangements for a trip to Peru.

August: XGF and I go to Peru for three weeks. My whole world view gets a serious re-orientation, as it does every time I travel. I believed the moment of my death was at hand at one point, which reinforces a precious notion of mine about living live as if it's an active verb. I catch and eat my own pirhana in the Amazon basin. I swim in the Amazon River itself, which is absolutely thrilling for all its mythic proportions. I decide to let my hair grow out.

September: I start graduate school in counseling psychology. It feel positively blissful to be back in school again. But I am also thrilled beyond belief to be meeting people who were just so NOT like the people I'd been dealing with in the corporate world. It speaks volumes, perhaps, that among the people I've met in school who I like the most, a few are corporate escapees like myself. S2 and I worked in the same field. Dr. M was doing something that sounds totally mismatched to her intellect and potential. Another woman I know is still in the biz (very similar to what S2 and I did), but she's got that attitude that, like mine was, is so disdainful of the incredibly fucked up ways people try to make their little corporate gerbil exercise wheels look more impressive than everyone else's gerbil wheels. She'll be getting out of it soon. But ... oh, I'm so glad not to be in the trenches.

October: I consider briefly whether it's possible for me to be in love with my Lifespan Development teacher. Considering he's a man and all, I decide: No, this is purely platonic admiration. But he *is* cute. I complain in a paper about the feedback I got in a sharing group, and said teacher writes in the margin, "Have you considered that you're just a better writer than everyone else?" This tickles me.

I get a new computer for my birthday. And, unexpectedly, Mahjong software.

November: S2 and I, forced to spend periodic Saturdays as a captive audience to a highly energetic, ADD-riddled psych professor, start to click with each other, and I think: This may be the beginning of something cool. At the same time, we also are forced to spend a periodic Saturday or two with a soft-spoken liberal do-gooder psych professor who bores the living shit out of us, especially with the annoying, pedantic purple book he assigns us to read. These are the kind of things that you bond over when you're, like, not in the Army.

On the homefront, sometime in November, I start wondering if XGf is having an online affair or something. She becomes withdrawn, closes herself up in the home office -- door shut -- for hours on end in the evenings after work. When I stick my head in to talk to her, she's be playing Mahjong, buying music online or ... something.

December: My final exam in Theory & Philosophy of Counseling takes me nearly two hours to complete. Granted, the first 20 minutes or so, I simply sat and *thought* about the questions. Then, I got to writing. By the end, my little Blue Book is trashed and my hand is cramping. I am the second-to-last person to finish, and I think, Uh-oh. In the end, it turns out I'm just more "thorough" than my classmates. So the professor notes, anyway. I'm not sure if that's a compliment or a nice way of calling me "excessive."

XGF's family Christmas party is at our house. Turns out to be the one day it snowed that month. Lots of people are delayed; they finally all arrive and the gift-opening commences in the most absurd fashion. I LOVE gifts -- giving and getting -- but these people give to each other in abundance and the unspoken rules are that even cousins must exchange gifts. As the snow started to accumulate outside, the anxiety level inside rose because no one wants to drive home in the snow. This family also likes to open *one gift at a time,* a process that normally takes a few hours. But they decide to rush it this year. Soon enough, everyone leaves in a huff and a flurry, and XGF and I are stuck with a gigantic ham.

At lunch on Christmas Eve, I see my mother for what has so far proven to be the last time. We are in a McMenamin's down in Oregon City. She looks at me with a sneer and says, not kindly, "What? Are you letting your hair grow out or something?" As a gift, she gives XGF and I two coffee mugs and a bowl "made of horsehair." Later, XGF will get to keep them -- along with every other Christmas gift but the ones she gave me.

January: New Year's Eve is spent at a Pink Martini concert, where XGF and I are some of the youngest in the audience. Of course, I don't look so old in that audience, and XGF is again mistaken for my *daughter*. I decide to color my hair. Suddenly, I look 15 or 20 years younger. (S2 told me the other day that I can, at times, pass for 25. I think she was being a little glib, but let's just say that's true. Back before I colored my hair, there were times I was passing for 50. So I guess from one extreme to the other, I can look as much as 25 years younger. How sweet is that?)

Not only do I look younger, but I notice that people start treating me differently. I get a lot more smiles. Even some of my classmates seem to warm up to me. This could be just from seeing me around again, but I think *some* of it has to do with the fact that they now perceive me to be closer to them in age, rather than someone's strange granny.

January also markes the endurance trial of Mr. Garrison's Group Therapy class. Awful experiences tend to bring people together. For S2 and I, it cements something between us. It also introduces me to Dr. M, who was in my Lifespan class but had remained enigmatic therein. (Truth is, she's *still* somewhat enigmatic, but what I know of her is likeable.)

And it was during January that The Debutante, with whom I also shared Lifespan and the hideous Group Therapy courses, starts coming to my house for little coffee visits. Turns out she lives just down the street, and I didn't know it. So we sit and talk and drink coffee and watch her child try to get my dogs to do tricks.

One day in late January, I have a rather startling realization about what's missing from my relationship with XGF. I sit on this information for some time, trying to decide what to do about it. The result is the beginning of the worst insomnia of my life.

February: The month starts out with me entering a second week of insomnia. Then, on February 9, I start writing my blog. Technically, you could go back in the archives and pretty much read everything that's happened since, and you would know the rest of the story. But the following summary is shorter.

By February 21, I realize the stuff missing from my relationship with XGF -- sexual chemistry and authentic communication, mainly, as well as her desire to move to the East Coast and my desire to stay put -- are not all that fixable. The slow demise begins.

Two days after we decide to break up, we throw a big old Mardi Gras party. This has its upside (I really needed to expend some energy, which I do by dancing) and its downside (XGF barely holds it together and drops the bomb on a couple of our friends at the party).

March: I begin the hunt for a new home. Briefly, I consider living with Bubba, but she and I can't agree easily on a place to live. One day, I walk into a loft and I know it's where I'm going to live. It just feels right. ... After spending a few days of Spring Break up at Lake Quinault with Bubba and Dr. M, I come back to town and commence moving. My new life begins.

There is a conversation with my mother that busts all previous molds for conversations between us. She does not like this and hangs up the phone on me. It's a beautiful thing, and I am proud of how I handled it. (We haven't spoken since.) My hair, by the way, is looking really sweet in March. Some of the curls are quite nice.

April: The pup Brogan and I settle in to a new home. Everything is new and disorienting to me. My insomnia is banished. It disappeared at the lake. But in my new place, I wake up in the night sometimes and don't know where I am.

I spend the month squirming under the weight of a broken heart. Even though I know I made the right choice for myself, it is a very painful one, and I struggle. S2 and Dr. M end up hearing the brunt of it because most of my friends were mutually shared with XGF and the situation is very sticky.

The semester at school comes to an end, and I find myself wondering how it's possible that, suffering from insomnia that at times left me feeling half-baked and neglecting my studies while focusing on the process of the breakup, ... how it's possible that I came out with all As. Uh-oh, I think, I've gone off and gotten myself into a school that's *too easy,* damnit!

In the midst of all of this, I find myself with a strange and rocky "friendship" at school. As I'm given to rumination, I spend too much time trying to figure out what's going on and why communication that seemed so open is actually so cryptic. My gut tells me to proceed with caution, but I don't do a good job of listening to that, and it all comes back around to bite me in the ass. This is not the kind of crap you need when you're trying to get your shit together after a breakup.

I make the mistake of reading women-seeking-women ads on Craigslist, and I realize that as a 37-year-old woman, it's going to be hell on earth finding a contemporary. I'm going to say the snobbiest thing here: It's also going to be hell on earth trying to find a woman who is smart enough for me, witty enough for me and SANE enough for me. The fact that I'd really like her to be a femme does not bode well. Nevertheless, I decide to ignore Dr. M's repeated suggestion that I "lower my standards." ... Please! Lowering my standards means expecting and wanting less for myself, and that is precisely why I left XGF in the first place. I was in danger of settling.

May: A two-week break between classes gives me time to face some of the pain in my breakup. But, really, I'm only scratching the surface. ... I decide, however, that I'm going to be single instead of settling, no matter how lonely that feels at times. ... In fact, I don't tell anyone this -- this would be the first time I've said it out loud -- but I decide that I'm *intentionally* going to stay single for a while because I need some time to think and to be with myself again. Jane Fonda turns out to be my inspiration for this decision. (And not just because her performance in "Barbarella" proves you don't need someone else to get your sexual needs met. It's because she told Ted Turner to call her back in six months.)

I buy a new hairbrush. I start learning to cook in earnest. I make soup and give it to my friends, feeling very proud of myself. In short, I start to get my shit together in the self-care department.

I cry. A lot.

June: Here I am! Things still feel unsettled at times. I am beset by grief unexpectedly (as that's the nature of grief). I've finished a course on Counseling Women at Midlife, and it's the first time in a few months that I actually kept up with my reading. I picked berries with S2 and her kids the other day. I'm having a party on Saturday night. I'm learning to play the cello. I feel fucked up in ways that are both devastating and glorious. It feels terribly disorienting at times.

But I know -- of all the wonderful things! -- that the lake is close to being warm enough for a swim. For the rest of the summer, I will remain a member of the leisure class. Then maybe in September, I'll get to work on something.