Exploring Directions my Life Could Go In
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I'm always waiting for my life to improve, and I don't mean that I'm just doing nothing. There's a time for doing things and a time for doing nothing except waiting. But when I see the signs, I am immediately ready to jump into action and do everything that I need to do.
But between those times are the moments when I just have to wait. During these times, it's important for me to be very, very patient because I can spend a long time in the waiting room. Overall, in the last ten years, my life has steadily improved, and I can see that by comparing my situations then and now.
I always divide my life into three parts: my family, my job, and everything else. Each part follows different rules and behaves differently. When there is a change in my life, it only happens in one area at a time. All the areas can't change simultaneously. I need to assess what is possible and what isn't possible to determine the state of that particular part of my life.
And there are things that I wish, and have wished, I could do, like taking my kids to the beach. But there was a time when I couldn't do that, and I just had to accept that the "Family" part of my life wasn't at the level where I could do that yet.
I'm even talking about the very small things in my life. There was a time when I couldn't have a certain food that I wanted, and then a change happened, and I could get it. If someone looked from the outside, it would seem like such a small thing, but to me, it was important, and I had to be patient while I couldn't have it. When I finally got it, I could see that that part of my life had changed and improved.
These small signs are important to me because if I'm hoping for something bigger, I can think that if I can't have this little thing, then it's definitely not the right time to have this bigger thing yet.
Then there are times when everything seems to be going well, but suddenly it feels like someone has pressed the reset button on my life. Something disappointing happens, and I feel like all the progress I've made has been erased. I feel let down by my life, and I wonder if my life has really changed.
Disappointment is a very strong feeling that repeats in my life. Even when I think I've moved away from the point where I could feel so low, something happens and I get dragged back into it.
During these times, I feel betrayed. My life was going so well, and everything was falling into place. I believed that good things could happen for me, and that I could make that final change in my life that would prevent it from going back to the way it was before.
On many occasions, I have been so close to that point, but just before the big change, something happens, and the whole process unravels, leaving me back where I started. This is accompanied by that familiar sickening feeling in my stomach and the crushing disappointment of another missed opportunity.
Looking back at those times, I can see that those opportunities actually weren't right for me. If I had looked more closely, I could have seen that there was always something about them that wasn't right. But each opportunity represented a different direction my life could have taken, and now it seems more like a list that I was exploring and crossing off as I went until I finally found the right thing for me.
