You know things are not going well when a good friend wishes you to be smelling the roses on next year’s New Year’s Eve. Yes, on the eve of 2011, friends were wishing me strength to make it through the new year so that I could be in a position to celebrate the following year. Right before Thanksgiving I had given my engagement ring back to my fiancé. I had used up my small savings decorating his new condo when I moved in, and my contract job was ending in January 2011. I had no partner, no job, and nowhere to live. What I did have was a lot of grief, sadness, and fear about my future. Not an auspicious beginning to a new year.
When we were together, I wasn’t worried about my contract job ending. I was planning to devote myself to my writing full-time, confident that I would earn a good living at it eventually, and that my fiancé made enough money to support us in the meantime. In hindsight, I see now that I could have done that anyway. I moved into an extra room in a friend’s apartment on January 2, temporarily, at a reduced rent, and I could have been writing this whole time. I am not beating myself up – the person I was at the time of the break up could not have dealt with the situation any differently than I did – but I see now that there is a different way to look at what happened.
I don’t need to worry about my future. I need to do what I love – write – as I had planned, and see where it takes me. If I was trusting my partner to take care of me until I reached financial success, and if he turned out to be not all so trustworthy in the end, can’t I trust God or the universe or whatever all-knowing, all-powerful life force is out there even more whole-heartedly? It’s a big step to take as my bank account dwindles, but what more perfect time to do it than now, when I literally have nothing to lose?
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