Prickly Pear

I hate to sound like a wooden plank sign at Home Goods, but y’all, Life. Is. Good.

I’ve been collecting moments. Memories. Sitting around and looking at what’s going on around me. Who I am with. What the temperature is. The wind in my hair. The sun on my face. The song in my head. The time of day. Recognizing that this feeling that has captured me is something to be seared into my mind. The other night I was in Key Biscayne after having dinner with some long time girlfriends. We sat on the beach and watched the moon rise from the ocean. It was around 9pm. I kicked my shoes off and walked towards the water. (Side note, I’m sure a lot of us living in South Florida may have similar a experience that we live 20 mins from the beach and we never go) Anyways, I knew, this was one of those moments. I stood on the shore and let the waves come and wash up on my feet. Warm and salty. Listening to the fizz and the slosh of the waves is just, ugh, magical. The beach at night is just *chefs kiss*.

I look up at the beautiful starless sky, cause, ya know, light pollution of South Florida, and felt just this overwhelming feeling of contentment. And I sat with my gfs for a few minutes and we just talked about life. Talked about divorce and marriage. Raising kids. Traveling. High school. And it felt so good. My friends, don’t EVER under estimate the power of a memory. And I’ve been thinking lately about the memories I’ve collected and how they’ve become so precious to me. And how even just driving home after a time out with friends leaves this emotion in my chest that expresses itself by tears on my cheeks. I sat in my drive way the other day after spending time with someone and I sat in the silence of my car after having parked. I sat and just sighed and laughed and my eyes teared up. I couldn’t even name the emotion. It was just the feeling that I’ve created a new life and I’m getting to enjoy it.

I watched a movie the other day called Love and Monsters. If you haven’t seen it, go ahead and watch it. This isn’t an IMBD review page, so I won’t get into the movie too much, but it’s a post apocalyptic/billions of people dead type of scenario. Just go see it. But there’s a scene in the movie, that one of the characters says “Don’t settle. Not even now, at the end of the world, don’t settle.”

Mind. Blown.

It still gives me the soft and squishies when I think about how that made me feel. I feel like so much of my life, I had to settle. And I thought this was the “adult” thing to do. To get close enough to the fire of happiness that you don’t freeze to death but never close enough to actually feel warm. I settled for a crummy marriage cause “you don’t just give up when things are lousy”. So I stayed, unhappy, unloved, and honestly, just sad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive advocate for fixing your marriage.

Trust me, divorce sucks.

But for me, I stayed and settled because I just didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to hurt that bad. That’s the short and sweet explanation.

But that quote struck me so hard. Not settling, not even at the end of the world, for less than what you want.

Like, how much of my life has been settling, just because I didn’t think I was worthy?

And there it is. The punch to the gut thought that makes me look inside and wonder, do I see my own worth?

Wow.

It’s weird to think about your past self as less than how you are now. We always remember “the good times. The good ol’ days”. We think about the past as this magical time that we’ll never get back to, but for some reason, we always see it as more. So thinking about my former life as less is a new feeling to me. But I wonder about it now, how could I of accepted so little? Honestly, I’m not really even mad at it. Building my new life was hard. And it hurt. And my heart was broken, over and over.

But.

It was magical. It was freaking amazing.

The people. The experiences. The life. The love. The laughter. The contentment of laying in bed, knowing that everything in my life is due to Gods grace and my own determination. Uggghhh how can you not have pride?

Wanna know where that pride comes from?

It’s not just from what I have accomplished. It comes from knowing my broken heart had a purpose. To have a broken heart means you tried something. Tried and not failed. To grow to love another person to the point where your heart gets broken is not a failure. Since when is effort a failure?

My son used to complain about these other kids he would play against online on Fortnite as being “try hards”. He’d say these kids would just try so hard to be good. And maybe Im crazy, but like, isn’t that the point? Like, wouldn’t I want to be categorized as a person who tried really hard? So, while my marriage ending was shameful and hurtful, I don’t consider it less because it failed. I know that I loved this man when we were together. And now that I don’t love him anymore, doesn’t mean I failed at loving him. It doesn’t make me less. It just means I was try hard. Haha.

I feel like my last few blog posts had a kind of sulky feel to them. And I couldn’t figure out why. But I think I just stopped growing. I hit a plateau so to speak. It felt like time was slipping away, speeding by more and more rapidly with everyday and I hadn’t really done anything of merit. Time slows down when you are trying new things. New experiences. New people. Getting out of your comfort zone. I feel like your mind clears the cob webs to make sure there is a place for new memories to lay. Like clearing a space on your book shelf for a new photo frame. It slows down, almost like when you’re channel surfing and you’re clicking away so rapidly you can barely even see what’s going on, when suddenly you see something that catches you attention and you stop the endless scrolling. Your trigger finger slows and you become involved in the program. Except the program is your own life and it’s binge-worthy baby!

I wanna be a try hard at everything. I want to embarrass myself with effort. I want to see the best in myself. I want my house and my mind and my heart to be full of cheesy inspirational quotes like teenager with a Pinterest page. I want my kids to not be discouraged by failure, or embarrassment, or social pressure or lack of inspiration or by a try hard mom.

I hate this lack luster approach that seems to be popular to not care. When did it become cool to not care?

The last thing I want to include in this post is the realization that I am not as easy going as I thought. It’s been revealed to me that I’m a little hard to get to know. One person described me as “rough around the edges”. Lemme tell you, I was a little taken back by it. In my mind, I’m the nicest, most understanding, most social person. And maybe I am those things, but as I’ve had these conversations with people, I realize that I’ve built up this massive wall that takes effort to get over. It takes effort for me to even allow anyone over. As a friend or a romantic interest. At first, I thought it was just due to me realizing that I needed to be more selective about who I spend my time with. But after a few “enlightening” conversations, I realize it serves two purposes: it helps to weed out the people who aren’t sincere, but it also creates an additional obstacle for those who actually want to be there. Like a prickly pear. I feel like maybe I’m a bit deceptive, unintentionally, but by presenting the puffed-out chest version of myself, who has this attitude of “come at me bro” has the tendency to make others have to put their guard up as well, when all I want is for someone to just see through the fluff. When the softer side is eventually shown, it’s a little confusing for the people who have only been presented with this version of me who requires a sharp tongue, and thick skin to be able to interact with me. Kind of makes me feel bad to be honest. It’s makes getting to know me hard and it causes intimacy to be leaked so slowly and infrequently, one has to wonder if I’m capable of letting anyone get that side of me. Last time anyone was that close, he broke my heart. But just because I was hurt in my past, should that make it that much harder for someone else to access to me? These are the questions I have to ponder now. I don’t want to be so stiff in my presentation of myself that any softness eventually revealed seems alien. I guess what I have to decipher now is how much about these things are due to pain of the past and how much is due to just being cautious? Cause let’s be honest, not all people deserve access to me. Gotta be a little selective. I’m not a buffet. And I don’t ever want to be.