Three years ago...

So I'm re-reading a few of my past posts here, and I found the most amazing words of wisdom. Even BEFORE I lost DH, I knew that today is all we have, all we are promised.

The past three years, for me, have been like one of those awful Stephen King nightmare novels: bad stuff just keeps happening, with no meaning, no reason. But in retrospect, I think it all DID have meaning, reason. Let's just say, it comes down to this quote: "What goes around, comes around."

I have never knowingly hurt another human or animal in my life. I have, yes, withdrawn and isolated myself to PREVENT hurting others. I prefer that to inflicting pain sometimes when honesty/truth is necessary, though I have occasionally espoused the blunt truth when it seemed unavoidable. But I didn't have a child, didn't give it away, didn't abuse it, didn't inflict the kind of misery some so-called parents do. I never abandoned, nor harmed a creature/animal in my life, and have made sacrifices for pets -- even to this day.

In short, I believe if you mistreat humans/animals it will come back to bite you in the @ss...not after death, and not in some other "lifetime" but in THIS life and before you die. I've thought extensively about those I've known/loved, and their seemingly untimely deaths/sufferings...but in the end, I can look back over their lives and see where something they did MAY have brought about their demise.

At any rate, maybe I'm just trying to make sense of the senseless, but I want to repost an entry I made three years ago:


Today's prompt: If you had to remember the moment in your life when you felt the most alone, when would it be?

I chose this question because it was immediately easy to answer, to know exactly the time in my life I felt (and was) most alone.

DH [dear husband] had started a new career; we were both in our late 20s. We'd almost always been together, had never even spent a night apart in our ten year marriage. [We have no children by choice, and this makes us even closer emotionally.) Then suddenly, he was gone nearly all the time, engaged in his new time-consuming career. He often didn't get in until past 8:00 PM, and was away on Saturdays, sometimes Sunday too.

We lived in a rural area of the South, and I was not satisfied there. I didn't like the southern rural people, and had learned over time that gossip and innuendo spread like wildfire. Whatever one did in public (or private) was instantly known, gossiped about and turned into wild tales, becoming more and more fabricated with each telling. I'd become isolated, no likeminded person with whom to talk, (no internet back then, of course) and fell into a depression. I had worked at various part-time jobs since we'd married, mostly clerical office work which I loathed; but I was not employed at that time. I had always wanted to write creatively, but had no confidence in my talent. I had family nearby, and did see them frequently, but I still felt totally alone.

I'll never forget one late afternoon, around the time most families sit down to dinner, when I went outside for a walk along a country road. A beautiful sunset shimmered on the horizon, but it only seemed to make me feel more lonesome. I could see families sitting at dinner tables, glimpsed through windows...and felt like an alien among them. I actually ached, I was so forlorn and miserably lonely. It was one of those agonizing moments that seems to magnify all that you feel, and I wanted so badly to change my life, somehow make it different. And I knew, in one way or another, whatever it took, I would bring about that change.

And I did. Eventually we sold our house there, moved into a city; I worked at a newspaper; I volunteered at the library. But most importantly, I began to write fiction in all my free time. I had friends then too, but the writing is what truly changed my life -- and my perspective. And I must give credit to many of the postal pen friends I had during that period; they were always encouraging me about my writing talent. I took a creative writing course, and then a journalism course -- which led to my position at the newspaper. However, in time I quit that job and concentrated on my creative writing.

In retrospect, I have to admit that the poignancy of the loneliness I felt during that period was life-changing, so it served a purpose. As I've aged though, I've learned NOT to depend on any other human being to prevent loneliness. I have learned I am my own best friend, my own best companion, and I could live alone now and not be unhappy. Yes, I am still married and I do enjoy the companionship with my DH. But I also know that to depend upon any other person to keep loneliness at bay is a mistake. And the truth of this one apt quote: "We are born alone, we live alone and we die alone."

There are worse things than being alone. If you look around at some of the miserable people in destructive relationships, you'll understand the wisdom of that statement.

It was almost as if I KNEW that I would someday live alone, and had already emotionally prepared myself for it. And also, that DH had abandoned me YEARS and YEARS ago...even before I was 30 years old.

Food for thought...for me, for others perhaps.