Lapses in Judgment

I was a horribly hard headed teenager that ‘ran away’ from my mother’s home at 19 straight into a boyfriend’s life and home. He and I moved in together in September, he proposed to me in late November, and I was sleeping on the couch and counting how many days I could go without actually talking to him by December. I knew I had made an astronomical mistake but felt utterly trapped and completely unable to help myself get out of the situation I had fought my own mother to get into.

I eventually did ask for help and I did get out before my first big mistake became a major legal commitment. Here’s to coming to your senses just in the nick of time.

In fact, I spent most of my 20’s trying to outdo myself with one bad mistake after another.
I was a raging success.

However, no one promotes or praises you for rapid fire-screw ups - in fact just the opposite is true (ahem). Go ahead and trust me on this, no need to try it out at home.

In 2004, grief had its way with me. That whole year is like a black hole, I can’t really remember
any details about it. It’s a wonder I didn’t drive right off a bridge because “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The next two years I spent most of time trying to figure out what exactly I had to do with my life to make the rest of it worth living without him. Really. Writing that makes me feel overly dramatic, which isn’t something I’m terribly comfortable with, yet, there it is.

In my darkest moments, I made some of my worst decisions.
In retrospect, it seems that I set myself up to fail when I was feeling down, almost as if I was off to prove to myself that what I really did best was screw up. Clearly, this turns into some sick Prozac-deficient cycle.

I hope I’ve left this behind, you know, with blue eye shadow, wings, choosing to date people that I thought I could ‘fix’, and running into bad situations because I was being defiant.

I can rock defiant.

I just don’t want to anymore.
I’m finally at peace with what I have and what I’ve lost up to this point in my life. Now, the fear resides in not doing something to screw it up.
It is almost paralyzing.