Tippng Points

Quick note: I didn't write this as a blog post. It is long, rambling, unedited and the result of insomnia in a hotel room with a sleeping husband. But it is exactly the kind of thing that I will decide not to post if I wait until tomorrow, so I'm posting it before I can change my mind. If you plan to read it, make sure you have a little bit of time! :)

Looking back, it always seems like there was some short period of time where everything changes, even when I know that it didn’t actually work that way. There is something in my brain that wants to wrap it all up in a nice package and say “This time. This is when it happened." In a month, or a year - or maybe even next week - I’ll tell you that it all happened this week – the week that Oxti got married. But tonight, before I put a frame on it and hang it on the wall, I have a chance of telling the whole story. You know that I have to give it a shot.

My 38th year played like an emotional version of the X Games – not just for me but for so many of those that I have in my life. My baby boy walked through his self created version of hell – and is only starting to come out the other side. HTH and I went with him - and not in the way that we would have hoped. We each had our own demons to fight and none of us came to terms with our own issues, or each others, quickly or easily.

Ours felt like an extreme case, of course, because it happened to me. But the emotional X Games happened all over this year for so many others – some stories that I know and some that I will never hear. One country song tells you that you’re going through a “burning ring of fire” and another one says that it’s just a “common case of everyday reality”. They are both right. My story isn’t all that special, but I can tell it because it is mine.

The fact of the matter is that I let myself get lost. The path of least resistance always had something to do with what I thought someone else wanted from me. It’s a bad habit, I know. I get better about quitting it every day, but it is my personal poppy field - a deadly comfort zone when I’m weary of working out my own direction.

I was in my own world for much of early 2009 trying to de-convolute my brain from my latest experiment in cultural assimilation. (It was a corporate culture this time and I can’t recommend it.) But while I was busy being lost in my head, a lot happened in the outside world. I won’t pretend that sorting myself out more quickly could have changed a single thing that happened for anyone else; part of me wants to believe that but there is no way that I can ever know and the ‘what ifs’ can get pretty treacherous. But my obliviousness did set me up quite nicely to be blindsided and I allowed that shock to put me into a crazy tail spin. As hard as it is to say, inevitability and powerlessness can start to look quite lovely to me in the wrong sort of light. After all, I can’t really be expected to try in the face of forces beyond my control.

The lesson I learned again this year is the difference between control and influence. I got so tired of giving corporate examples of “influencing without authority” that I decided to retire from influencing my own world. You can try to imagine what that looks and feels like if you want, but I hope that you can’t do it. Quite frankly, I hope that I won’t be able to remember what it was like in a year or two. But at the end of July – yes, just before my birthday – I recalled myself to active duty. I began to attend to the business of my life again. Today, 6 weeks later, I believe that in doing that I began to touch the worlds of my own family in a positive way again.

I am not writing this from the end of the story. Believe me when I tell you that I have not yet fully recovered my self from my dis-ease. I am still finding my own direction and trying to understand how I can weave all of my strands back into a stable, coherent pattern. And despite the fact that, someday in the future, I will probably tell you that this week was the tipping point I have no idea what the other side of the seesaw looks like yet.

But here is what I do know. This week, my son took some very adult ideas and chose to act on them - and did it with a level of personal commitment and integrity that I could never have managed at 17. This week, I taught some others what I’m learning about taking care of myself. This week, I acted as a musician’s manager. This week, my husband and I took some time off – from the business and the craziness of this last year – and just had fun. And this week, my sister officially added a brother to my family. And the really crazy thing is this – it’s only Friday. I wonder what will happen tomorrow?