I feel like I haven’t written in a while.  I know I want to write, but I just haven’t been in a good place, and honestly I haven’t had anything going on in my head that would be interesting enough to read.

Until this weekend.

I know I want to say something about it, I’m just not 100% sure how to go about it, because it’s still kind of a blur to me.  I’m at work right now, and it’s a bit of a slow day, so I turned on my Amazon music.  The very first song that popped up was this one, Hello by Adele.  Have a listen and then come back:

Ya know, we all relate differently to songs. This one resonated with me, and if you could, try to think about the song as myself talking to myself.  Adele is speaking to an old flame, I’m speaking to another Robin.  I can’t tell if it’s the smarter one, the kinder one, the Robin of the future or the past.  It doesn’t really matter which one it is, the only thing that matters is that there is a conversation happening.

Have you ever just sat very quietly and thought deeply about the whys and hows of being in a certain place and time in your life?  I guess this might just be something that I go through around my birthday, but I’m not sure.  You take a moment or an hour or a week and really go deep inside yourself.  Sometimes it’s a temporary audit of sorts.  Sometimes it’s a more in depth realization.  Many times it’s not a fun place to be.  We can all kind of kick ourselves for making mistakes, and we’re all guilty of that.  But what happens when you look through the looking glass and what you see makes you cringe, makes your stomach curl up into a knot so tight that you can barely breath?  You want to breath, you want to gulp the air like you’ve been holding your breath for way too long, but you can’t.  You get just enough air to barely squeak through.  It’s enough to sustain you, but no more.

I think I might be rambling, and maybe it’s difficult to follow what I’m saying, and for that I apologize.

Have you ever wanted to just run away, just get into your car and drive until you run out of gas, then walk the rest of the way to nowhere?  Have you ever wanted so badly just to get the hell away from everyone and everything?  The slightest sound from another person’s mouth makes you wince and wither?  The mundane repetition of your every day life sucks the enthusiasm from your body like a mental power hose.  Your patience for stupidity or any non-agreeable logic is replaced with just a simple sigh.  Your energy is zapped by the constant pressure to do and be.  Be a good wife.  Be a good mother.  Look presentable every single fucking day of your life.  Clean your house.  Cook dinner.  Laundry.  Care and care and care until you feel you’re going to vehemently explode and collapse into a pile of useless cortisol stuffed blubber?

Aren’t we all on a continual journey of reinvention?  For me, I’ve had to reinvent a lot of areas of my life.  Most don’t understand the dilemma that it causes for me.  It might even sound petty and minuscule to many.  For example, my desire to wear heels even though I’ve had many surgeries and problems with my feet.  To most who don’t care to wear heels, it sounds ridiculous.  But think about this:  I enjoy wearing heels.  I feel like a different person.  I walk more intently.  I enjoy my clothing more, and actually feel thinner in heels.  I’m taller, so I feel more in control of my life, towering over my problems.  I feel prettier.  Heels do that for me.  I relate to my heels and they never let me down.  Now that you know that, how petty is it really that a pair of heels can do that much for me?  Don’t you feel bad about rolling your eyes (possibly in private) when I’ve conveyed my sadness over losing my heels?  Imagine having the ability to feel better about a lot of things just by putting a certain kind of shoe on your foot.  Who wouldn’t want a sure thing pick me up?  Do you have something that automatically makes your feel better?  It might be a thought or a smell, a food or whatever.  Now take that away. Reinvent yourself, against your will.  You wanna go down fighting like me don’t you?  So it’s not just a pair of shoes to me.

That’s just one of the hurdles I’ve had to jump though in the past say 10 years.  There are so many more that are incredibly important in my life, and they genuinely have all gotten together over the weekend and wreaked havoc on my psyche.  It was a war of sorts, all of them barreling toward me at once, intent on crushing my spirit and send me spiraling toward the deepest part of who I am at the present time.

And it continues to affect me today, albeit more muted and subtle.  I have to have my work face on.  I have to be the fucking academy award winner for her portrayal as a normal person  “other Robin” today.  I’ll pretend everything is fine, not wanting to make anyone worry or judge.  I’ll autopilot – drive the kids to hockey practice and sit and glare out onto the ice with a blank stare, wanting to be anywhere but where I am.

You might not be in the same place as I am right now, but most likely you’ve been there in the past or maybe you’re going to visit there in the future.  It’s got to be one of the loneliest places you can go to, because only you can help you. It’s just one more reinvention on top of all the other reinventions you’ve either failed or succeeded in.

There may be some of you who say, “It’s called life….”, and you’d be right.  That doesn’t make it any more easy or acceptable when you’re going through it.  Try to describe losing a loved dog to a person who has never owned a dog.  It’s difficult if not impossible to understand what someone else is going through, even when they try their hardest to describe it.

I have no idea where to end this post, because for me I’ve got a lot of work in front of me.

….so I’ll just stop typing….