New Year's Eve and Beyond

So here we are again, my friends, on the night before we all supposedly get a blank slate. A fresh new year, ready to be adventured in and conquered and mastered and to find greater success in, whatever your definition of the word may be.

I’ve written here before about how my definition of success is happiness, and last year around New Year’s I declared that 2015 was going to be the year I finally figured it all out—the happiness thing.

Life had other plans.

2015 turned out to be one of the most difficult years of my life, physically and emotionally. I stand on the other side of it looking back over the chasm I’ve swung across (on a rope that barely reached) and try to catch my breath.

I’m not running, but still feel out of breath. Then again, maybe I've never stopped running, and that's why I can't find peace.

I’m hoping to learn in 2016; a lot of things. Even if not finally finding a way to capture and keep hold of that elusive emotion called ‘happiness’ and have it reign in my life more days than not. 

I am, and will continue to be, grateful for the good that is.

I’m hoping to learn how one deals with… well, all the things that you know I’m dealing with and the things I don’t post here, the things no one knows I’m dealing with.

I want to learn to find stillness inside my own head, which is so often chaos because the Bipolar doesn’t go away with the opening of a new calendar.

I want to learn how to let my father go, while keeping the memories that we made in life close to me in a way that doesn’t hurt so much to remember.

I want to learn to let go of people who have already let go of me.

I want to feel peaceful and calm like a freaking Jedi Knight and not so much tossed about by the waves of my wonky neurotransmitters. With the potential loss of a major medication coming in the next few months (my insurance no longer covers it and I am not independently wealthy…) I don’t know where the journey will take me once my supply runs out.

I’ve come to realize that from day to day, I have no idea where life will take me, or what it will take from me.

I want to GIVE this year. Perhaps small but tangible things. I want to give back in the world that is offline and make just one person’s day better for it somewhere along the line.

I want to matter in some small way to someone who will never know my name by spreading as much kindness around as I can.

I want at once to lose myself (ego) and find myself (my true being). As an Idealist (INFJ) I may always be on that search. But change is already happening to me, I feel it in my cells day by day; it has been happening for a while and it continues. Who I am becoming I’m not entirely sure but at the end of it all I am certain my core will still be who I always have been.

Then again, maybe not.

Maybe the kind of change I’m feeling is the kind that rewrites your DNA; the kind that you fear for so long but once you’re in the midst of it you just want to keep going forward because you know ahead of you has got to be something better than where you (emotionally) are.

There has got to be more.

There has got to be more than promoting books (which I hope to learn to do more effectively in 2016 so I can spend less time accomplishing more) and trying to survive being a person with Bipolar and co-existing conditions.

There has got to be more than panic attacks and fighting unseen villains you cannot best.

There has got to be more than being in so much physical pain all the time that you just can’t function.

There has got to be more than grieving for people who stopped caring what happens to you a very long time ago. No matter who they are.

I want to find meaning now; and not just because there’s a new year coming.

I want to live that meaning now, in this moment and in every moment to come because I have got to believe I am worth fighting for if I’m ever going to find my way through the darkness of each dawning new day.

My word for 2016: Transformation.

Watch this space.

May you all find what you are seeking: in 2016, and beyond.

Happy New Year, everybody.

xoxo

bru