Life’s challenges have always

directed the steps I’ve taken. And now after much struggle and wandering about, while searching for a sane environment, I have arrived at a calm and peaceful place blessed with whole and healthy people. But it’s so strange, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to direct myself. I’ve always run around saving this from that and that from this. So, now, with a peaceful life and very little stress, I feel lost. It may be safe to say I feel half-dead.

But I am not half-dead and my conscious and alert mind knows stress is just a habit. So I must try to remain grateful for the time I’ve never had; time to freely choose my daily course. (Still, I feel like a stranger to myself but I’m going to learn myself anew.)

In this brand new experience, I have time to decide from among a range of opportunity. I have time to make a decision from amid a number of different things; choose what is best or most suitable. I have time to make a deliberate assessment, a purposeful evaluation. I have time to choose according to my own sensibilities. I have much to be grateful for and therefore my first choice regarding what I ought do is: I choose to be grateful. And I choose to thank J for his love and be faithful to use this opportunity for our united well-being.

How can a woman become so confused?

I have lived more than four decades, raised my children, failed at numerous love relationships, find myself in a relationship with a man who loves me and feel more confused in my life than I think I've ever been.

Is it me or is it harder to finally get to the place where you tried so hard to get to for so long?

It's as if the life of struggle became my identity and it's as if I even feel more alive when struggling. At least I feel more normal. Now I need to learn to struggle with the person I am who has less obstacles that have to do with other people and more to do with my own fears and negativities.

This is a strange phenomenon I need to fix, now. (Honey just came home and we're going out to eat and he's talking to me....

Today I was talking to my 24-year-old daughter

about the movements and rhythms of creativity. She described them so well. People who are not like me do not understand why I need time to feel these movements. I need to find people who are like me and her. My life has been full of people who think I’m all wrongheaded about the way to be. There are many ways to be and I need to find people who understand the creative process.

It reminds me of Sam. She was a jeweler and I thought she understood. Well, she understood to some degree, for herself. But would go ape shit when I needed to spend so much time sitting at the window in the café writing. I stopped going to the café when I moved in with *Jake* because he “suggested” it repeatedly, over and over again. Like all his other suggestions that were really demands, commands.

I loved him too much. I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore and was trying to get it back. I guess I’ll opt for it now though because living lost like that was killing me. I’d rather live without him and be able to hear my own sensibilities. It was crazy and he just doesn’t get it, well, unless of course this is all just a ruse and it’s the normal reason for someone to break it off….

Geez, a lifetime sure goes by fast these days.

He has no clue what I've been doing and what I was trying to plan. No clue because I think he's deaf in his heart.

Before I write another book

(because it takes so long and I feel like a piece of shit) I think I'm going to do some more articles for artist's productions for local newspapers. I think I'm also going to live alone, if I can manage it, so that I can hear myself think, so that I don't have to listen to people who don't know a damn thing about citizen journalism or online journalism tell me how it's done.

Yesterday, my best friend told me she never opens a newspaper. Never. Yet, she too is always telling me how to do it. I could scream. I'm the one who has written for seven newspapers. I'm the one with the experience. Why do I have these types of people around me? People who barely read anything about the arts too, are always trying to tell me about it. I'm so angry.

I wrote 800 pages for my first book. Then I was told what to do and I followed my lover's advice. At that time I was experimenting to see if that worked. I guess I followed his advice too many times because now he's a spoiled brat.

Yes, this is just another unedited free-writing rant.

I thought the man I knew for years

loved me but all of a sudden he’s just done with me, sick of me, or something. I would have never moved in here if I didn't hope to believe his promises: that he is different, not like the other guys. LOL

Of course there are logical reasons, "bad things I did," like I didn’t help him the right way with his work issues.

But what about the promise of a lifetime of love? I was trying to organize a new way to help him, with the knowledge I have, but it wasn’t as easy as he believed it should be; he couldn't hear what I was saying. I’m sad but I hate him too for breaking his promise to me. The promise he told me over and over and over again. I hate him.

He encourages me in one breath but in the next he denigrates everything about it, every idea I have in my own field. But it’s just because he doesn’t know and too often, already, I have done my art job or papers his way and each time, it is wrong. Why does he think he’s right all the time.

Why doesn’t he really trust that I know what I do know. It’s confusing. He hates my art, he's always saying things that prove he thinks it's just a waste of time. He insists that all he’s ever done is encourage me but my confidence is about ankle high because he’s always telling me how I’m not thinking right and I can't just sit around all day doing what I was trained to do because it's not making any money yet.

Then he want's me to act for his potential client that he's like all yah, really cool into art, a real art appreciator. He's a fraud and though I've done a lot to support and encourage his aspirations, he has been beating my soul down regarding mine.

He won't say that though. He's the one who insisted I do school--his way! Of course, everything has to be done his way because he has to "save me from [myself]." I fucking hate him. Funny how he never did this the seven years I knew him before I gave it up to him. I HATE HIM!

But he tells himself whatever he wants to tell himself--I don't have to listen anymore and sometimes, even, I'm happy for the prospects of regaining my own self-worth.

And I'm so glad I didn’t believe him enough to marry that fraud--divorce is such a drag--just another consumer product that is marketed and sold to the unaware masses.

Funny thing is I hope that after I'm long gone he gets responses from the stuff I did get out for him and makes lots of money and he can kick himself in his fucking ass. And that was me just getting started.

Did I mention that

I don’t know how to write a book?

*laughs at self*

You know what’s really funny?

Below a spammer responded to my reactions to my partner (who vowed to love me until he dies) who just kicked me out. I opened the website and had to laugh out loud (LOL). I do everything s/he said; am expert in fact. Another one down.

I’m going to write a book. LOL!

I’ve been writing since I was a kid and am a certified online journalist and am in school for a bachelor’s in journalism but I probably don’t want to do journalism (all my journalism courses are finished so I might as well finish the other crap). I’m going to write a book and sell it. Of course it’s a stupid idea but apparently, I’m pretty stupid. He tells me all the time. Of course he says he doesn't mean that.... He's just a control freak and persistently tells me what's wrong with my ideas and what's right about his ideas and in his uncreative mind, writing a book is a waste of time.

I think part of the reason I’m going to write a book is because my partner has been telling me for three years that I can’t just sit around and write all day and so I did things he thought I should do and he’s kicking me out anyways, so I might as well go back to square one. Because as it turns out, he's been the real waste of my time.

My personal opinion on men and relationships

I don't know why I continue to put myself through the types of things I put myself through to retain a relationship with a man. It no longer makes any sense to me. In a list of pros and cons, single life is better.

According to Clarissa Pinkola Estes

in her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, if I just keep doing my work it will fulfill me in many ways, including economic. And I'm going to need a better economic situation because the man who promised to love me failed to say his promise was conditional. And, obviously therefore, he failed to tell me what those conditions are and in fact told me he loved those qualities in me. Oh well, you can never believe what a man says.

Some women aren’t cut out to be wives

Some women aren’t cut out to be mothers. Some women aren’t even cut out to be girlfriends. Why is this so difficult to understand?

It’s strange how we dream for years

about a place we want to arrive at and then everything’s different when we get there. I guess it’s just a matter of resolution or doggedness amid the disappointment, regardless. It seems all of life is merely holding it together.

I wish I could figure out my feelings

I have an incomplete in one class that I must but don’t want to try to complete, I was just granted my program to register for classes in the fall, which I barely want to do but I just must finish; I find sleeping peacefully difficult most nights and being awake as difficult most days. And this in the best years of my life. That seems strange to me.

I understand these types of feelings when you’re in disastrous situations, facing banishment and paucity, abandonment and mistreatment by people you thought loved you, disrespect and deception by people you thought were your friends. But this is not the case anymore and, thus, I find it difficult to understand my consistent sadness.

7:44 p.m. Update: I finished my 20-page portfolio! I used articles from a former blog to help me. I was happy for about an hour and immediately started worrying about the next thing that needs to be completed, and the thing after that, and the thing after....

It is time for new emotions: gratitude

I must remember one thing from my past. I must remember how to focus. Today, I am required to focus on gratitude because today there is reason. I remember years ago, coming from a hypocritically religious home, I was grateful for tiny scraps of less abuse and hatred by the people who claimed their love and righteousness ad nauseam. And most will advise me to seek professional counseling but I’ve spent years in therapy and if I haven’t figured it out by now, I’ll never figure it out. However I will, each day as I wake and sleep I will remember the good that I learned then and will change the course of my emotional wanderings. I will warn myself away from wrong paths and will walk straight ahead and find the peace in my soul that a sensible life deserves.

Yesterday, I took some sage

from my spice cabinet and emptied the decorative doo-dads from my potpourri dish, added some corn oil to the little bowl and lit the candle beneath. Last week, women on a forum for women’s issues were discussing the power of sage. They said it rids your home of evil spirits and negativity. One woman said she uses it each time she moves, each new home where she is making her life. Could it be true that the sage went through my rooms and nostrils yesterday so that I could see today that I do not any longer have reason to fear? Could it have been evil spirits that were keeping me scared? Scared that my past was in my closet? And of closets: The other night I woke up in my closet. I believe that is the first time in my 47 years that I have ever walked in my sleep.

Fear wants to cripple me now

Fear that at any moment the earth will disappear beneath my feet and the fear cripples me. Then shock takes over for I’ve never been crippled. In all those years I was able to walk and run as needed and now, why now am I terrified? Why now when it’s all over are my days full of trembling? My partner will not crack my jaw but I fear he’ll shoot me if I take one misstep; every day I fear he really hates me deep down under his smiling face but instead, as if to make fun of my pain, every day he tells me how much he loves me. By noontime I can count on Mr. Boston to help me forget the torture in my mind but in the middle of the night, when the vodka wears off, I wake and wander around the house and weep in fear of nothing.

I didn’t think things were going to turn out this way

Out of high school and after escaping from the home where my mother’s boyfriend and two others molested me, I packed my things on my 18th birthday. I set out to make a better life for myself. That was just under 30 years ago and if I had known what was going to happen, I would have never had the audacity to believe I could make a better life for myself. So much has happened since then. Yesterday, the girlfriend I met along the way 20-something years ago, said to me: “you’ve had such an interesting life.” All I want to do is say I’m glad it’s over, resist tears and learn to live this new life that I’ve finally found and rid my memory of all that interesting life so I’m not riddled by fear, scared around every new corner I take still; remember to be grateful, instead of fearful, now in my new world, my sane life finally, 29 years later.

I dreamt of a horse from another place or time

He was friendly with me and let me ride it but it also got weird at one point and acted like it wanted to kick me but didn’t. It was just warning me. The horse also did it to another person who I was with. We were outside on my back porch and it was rolling around on the boards then and I could see it was hurt in some way; it had bare patches on its back. Prior I was also riding on the side of it, holding onto B. M. and standing on his one foot, which he kept held out like a stirrup. The horse did not have a saddle. Each time it did not have a saddle. We walked or cantered by L. N. and I wondered what she thought of me on the horse like this, standing on the side of it, and I wondered if she knew B. M. was my high school sweetheart.

At other points in the dream, L.N. and her friend repeatedly came to stand in the same place at the same time and wait for the same thing each day discussing a soap opera-style series on television. The last time she is there with her friend who is a teacher, my companion remarks on them and they hear it and leave because they recognize their predictability and don’t want to be predictable or they just don’t want to be heard by other people talking about the same television show every single day as they attempt to guess the next part of the story line--what will she say, what will he do…etc.

At another point I am happy to find all the ingredients to make butter cookies after I realize I can’t make oatmeal because there are no oats in the box of Quaker. Someone replaced the emptied box with another type of no-cook breakfast cereal. I dream about many of the steps to melting the butter, looking for the right size large glass measuring cup so I can make it in my familiar stir-method style. I am also measuring to see if I can stretch what we have to make the whole batch and I know that there’s barely enough but will serve to create nice moist sweet cookies with less flour. I plan to and do use a package of instant pre-sweetened oats. I also realize I don’t have eggs but I figure it will work without them and it does. They are nice and moist when finished, however none of my children want any.

I get a letter from the teacher, who reminds me of the teacher on a women’s forum whose nickname is hellolizzie. She and L.N. have drawn up a lengthy complaint letter to me about my failure to help my daughter on a specific school project. As I’m reading the letter, I’m underlining parts with some sort of glue or goo that squeezes out of some type of tube/hose. Someone to my right is complaining about how I am doing it but I just wipe it down and the stuff turns clear--just as I suspected. It was violet and has the consistency of glue and will dry like epoxy. The letter, in the end, means nothing. There is no complaint, there is nothing I have to do or fix. L.N. and hellolizzie were standing to my right and a little behind me as I read it and leave soon afterwards.

Meanwhile, my three or four-year-old daughter J is in the bedroom yelling at her father, who has just returned from somewhere but who is rarely home. She’s calling him an alcoholic and will not let up. I wonder if she’s doing the right thing, or if I should stop her, but I realize she’s just a kid and it appears to be the moment in her life where she needs to scream at him and let him know of all her frustration and pain--until she gets it all out of her system.