New Beginnings

I don’t post much personal stuff on my blog, it’s never been the space for it. However for some reason, while I was banging out a regular post on my keyboard, all these voices and feelings swirled around in my head and became so loud that I just had to stop my regular post-scheduling and start writing this instead.

Sorry author interview, I”ll get to you another time, I promise!

So, I’ve mentioned off and on in my blog over the last few months that I’ve been feeling restless and out of spirits. The past year and a half has been a lot like I was running around in circles trying to catch my own tail, and not quite succeeding. It’s true that a lot of stuff – my MIL passing away, my husband’s job hassles, my son’s speech delays, my daughter being consistently bullied (yes, I haven’t blogged about some of these things before, but that’s something we were are dealing with), these were all external events that bogged me down tremendously.

There were other things as well, things that I couldn’t and still can’t put a name to – a nagging sense of unfulfillment, a feeling of time whizzing by and me running in place going nowhere, a sense of loneliness because I had neglected old and good friends (too busy juggling career + kids)…maybe it’s an early mid-life crisis 😀 , whatever it was I knew I didn’t want to passively accept the situation for what it was.

I’ve made some small baby steps towards changing this up. First up, I have started eliminating stuff that were cluttering up my life and stopping me from doing anything meaningful.

A small change but which lightened up my spirits quite a bit was deciding that if I felt strongly enough about something, I should just say it, and not worry too much about hurt feelings.

It was something simple – disposing off my MIL’s old furniture. My husband is a hoarder and so is my FIL, but I really didn’t want duplicate dining sets, sofa sets, and beds cluttering up the place. This issue has been at a standstill for the past 1.5 years, K knew I was unhappy about bringing the stuff home, I knew he was unhappy about leaving the furniture in an empty house. But we were struggling with so many other stresses that we really didn’t want an open fight on that issue.

Finally this weekend something snapped. After yet another discussion going nowhere, I made an instant decision, I went to the house, did a major clean-up, took photos of all the stuff that could be salvaged, posted ads on Quikr and Olx, and offloaded everything within the next week. At first I thought K would be mad/depressed about it, but then I saw the relief in his face. It was one job done, and we didn’t have to worry any more about good furniture rotting away in an empty house.

Cleaning up the place also left it free for future rental, and almost magically, we got a tenant within the week. Sometimes you just need to clear up space for new things to enter your life. I sound almost zen don’t I 😉 ?

I’ve been eliminating clutter from my emotional space as well – no longer willing to deal with people with double agendas and frenemy style of relationships. After all, how could I tell my daughter to keep her chin up and hold her ground when I myself wimped out of confrontation when double-speak was the order of the day?

So, with all this elimination, what’s left? Honestly I don’t know. All I do know is clearing up my emotional, mental, and physical space has given me so much satisfaction. Plus, it’s a universal law of physics that things flow into empty spaces, right? Hopefully, this time it’s all the good things.