Out of the Darkness

Alright, last lesson to pass on from The American.  When he threw my heart in the waste bin he said he didn't want to be around someone who drank like a 21 year old.  Aside from his comment and my dear dad also telling me that one day alcohol had to get gone I decided to give it up.  Here are three lessons sobriety has taught me.

1) I feel great!! I didn't realize how sh#t drinking made me feel until I cut it out of my life for two weeks.  Week one I didn't really notice but by week two I noticed everything was better.  Food, mornings, working out.  Everything felt a little more alive.  Every passing week I feel physically better.  I lost weight and read a lot about how alcohol effects metabolism.  I replaced happy hour with spin classes. My skin started to get a glow.  Every second of every day just feels better.

2) Emotions are good.  Alcohol was definitely keeping my demonds in the dark.  It distracted me from loneliness, anger, sadness.  The truth is these feelings are not so bad.  Feeling them is actually better than numbing them away.  Numbing them made them come back with a vengeance and caused me to be totally unbalanced.  I now have emotional clarity.  Stability.  Happiness.  I am not afraid to feel what I need to, to learn what I need to learn about myself and continuously grow.  Alcohol was stunting me as a person.

3) I have confidence again and I mean real, clear, beautiful confidence. No hazy weekends making me self conscious. No uncertainty of embarrassing flirtations.   No more useless numbers in my cell that never go anywhere except make me doubt my self worth. All the negative mental seeds planet by alcohol have been uprooted and are gone.  They have been replaced by gorgeous clear and conscious decisions which  have rewarded me with confidence and for this I am grateful.

 I should clarify that I was a weekend warrior primarily.  I would have fun on the weekends but I realized that alcohol brought nothing positive to my life so I am turning over a new leaf.  Thanks for reading. XO

Funked

A series of unfortunate events from family stress to fully and finally rebounding to being stood up tossed me down the emotional low rabbit hole.  I got in a real funk and was desperate to pull myself out of it.  But, it just wasn't letting me, so rather than fight it I went with it and learned the following important lessons:

1) Sadness is a part of life. I was trying to go a million miles and distract myself from my reality rather than feel sad for a few days.  Sadness is really looked down upon, everyone is always telling us to smile and look at the bright side and somehow it had got me to identifying sadness as a bad thing.  But, it isn't.  It feels terrible but if you let it run its course you will be stronger for it.  

2) Learn what you can.  I learned that extreme positivism is the most irritating way to try and help someone in a funk.  My girlfriends have told me this about the way I am.  One of them said "I just want you to listen and not give me a bunch of solutions." To which I thought she didn't mean it because giving her solutions was helping and helping was caring, etc.  Until on Friday I experienced exactly what they found so irritating.  While stewing in my negativity my dad kept texting me positive life affirmations.  Rather than snap at him I realized while his intentions were the purest they came across as him not listening.  I told him that he had just taught me something valuable. 

3) Things have to change.  I touched on this briefly in my previous post about no longer pursuing men.  But, my change has to be larger than this.  Getting funked was a greater indicator that I needed to really look with in myself and my life and improve all the aspects I didn't see as favorable.  I want to call my grandmother more, drink less wine, never smoke again, not meet men at pubs, save more money, travel more, do more fun activities (like cooking dinner) together with my friends and exercise more.   I realized the only true way to say goodbye for good to the funk was to change my life.  So this is what I am working on. 

See I don't think that you should never get in a funk, but I do think once you feel yourself through it you need to focus on what you have learned and why.  Be honest with yourself.  My funk made me realize I had come out of focus and was making old mistakes again.  Everyone is a work in progress. 

Thanks for reading. XO

The Chase

I was doing it wrong.  So I blogged before about the excitement of the chase and how I actively have pursued men with out regret that I was the hunter.  That is when I realized this mentality is why I never get flowers, and I always have to come up with date ideas and in general have attracted duds.  The following are three reasons you should let yourself be pursued.

1) Hello confidence, you sexy beast! You know what is the best feeling? When someone puts effort in.  When they tell you they want to get to know you, or take you out or that you are gorgeous! Being chased by a love interest is one of the best feelings.  Being asked out makes your heart skip a beat in a special way that we all deserve to feel more.

2) For some reason when a man chases a woman it is typical but when a woman chases a man she looks desperate and clingy.  There is something so stressful about putting out a text and then waiting for a response while your inner lunachick begins to coach you into doing more grand acts to influence him to spend time with you.  Easy boots!!! Don't chase him and see what happens.

3) Relax.  I touched on this about the expectations of dating.  Some how when I start chasing a love interest it lays the groundwork for a major dysfunctional relationship.  A relationship where I hold all the stress, decisions, pressures, worries and somehow I become the only one working on things.   But, not any longer.  Now I am going with the flow and letting the chase take me where I need to be.  What is that old saying - you cannot expect things to change if you keep doing the same thing.

So I am trying a whole new approach to recognizing my self worth and seeing where being the hunted will take me.   The truth is I always thought If I didn't give it my all I might miss out.  BUT! I recently realized if a man doesn't give it his all he is missing out on me, and that is a lot to miss out on.  Thanks for reading XO

Your Ex has a new future Ex

Everyday I read my horoscope.  Not because I believe in it, but because I find it the best part of the depressing newspaper.  On the full moon I read I was going to have a love epiphany.  And, miraculously I actually did.  The American has a new girlfriend, which of course brought up the subtle sensation that I was not good enough as he ripped my heart out and moved on.  But, then while commuting yesterday I figured it out.   Here is what I learned:

1) He is missing out.  That is right, I am worth it.  I always felt like I needed to change myself, to better myself to keep a man but then I realized, enough.  There is nothing wrong with the strong and beautiful woman I am. Any man that ever makes you feel you need to change isn't man enough to handle all the woman you are.

2) A little effort please.  Due to the self shaming mentioned above and my views on gender equality I put in way too much effort.  In doing so I didn't get any of the things I wanted emotionally.  The compliments, the passion, the everything.  I got stuck swimming upstream with duds because rather than see the warning signs I tried to fix them.   Not anymore.  From now on I take the red lights as exactly that.

3) Duds - why do I always find them.  My dad actually said yesterday "You have a real knack for picking them." Seriously.  So I got to thinking why? And realized I am always so comfortable with duds.  They are usually intrigued by my career and hobbies and I always assumed that men winning in life would not be.   Then I realized I was doing my love life all wrong.  A man who is successful will be a perfect match for me.

So it all came to perfect sense that I couldn't expect to find Mr. Amazing if I kept falling for the wrong guys at the wrong time who treated me wrong.  Don't get me wrong! I am still into dating culture but just taking it to a new level with new confidence and standards.  Thanks for reading. XO