 Last week was the first one in the two years since I started my little ol’ website that I didn’t write a blog post.
It had to happen, and here’s why. It was a hectic Monday morning. I had been sick for the prior 10 days, and I was way behind on more than a few projects. I was scrambling to get organized, return some calls and tie up some loose ends that had gotten badly frayed the week before. I was a hot mess. My brain was still hazy, so coming up with a viable blog topic became a futile pursuit. The only things I could think of to say involved a litany of complaints of how shitty I felt. And lemme tell you what, feeding the self-pity monster is never good for my mental state. By about 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon, after hours of worrying over not having a single word on the page, a radical thought occurred to me: “What if — just what IF — you skip a week, Amy?” And so I did.
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 I’m really fortunate today to live a comfortable, middle-class existence. I’ve owned a cute, cozy, two-bedroom bungalow in the Highlands for 10 years.
I have an ancient car that runs OK but isn’t pretty to look at. But, if I need to replace it sometime soon, I could swing the added payments with very little hardship. My business has been steady and successful so far, and I cannot emphasize enough just how much I love being my own boss. Sure, I’ve got some debt, the house is always going to need some work, and I can’t afford to travel the world right this minute. Life ain’t perfect, but the intangibles of peace and serenity make up for any material things I might lack at the moment. Truly, I have everything I need and most everything I want. That wasn’t always the case. I’ve never lived in a cardboard box, but I definitely started at the bottom … in a crappy apartment with a minimum-wage job. When my son, Ethan, was small, we were even on food stamps for a couple of years. I wrote a bit about that time in our lives here.  I have a lot of alcoholics and addicts in my life. The majority of them are what I would call non-practicing, but there are a few still swirling around in the madness.
The ones in recovery all have one thing in common: they have taken responsibility for their actions. Yes, they have a sickness of the mind, but they don’t blame any outside forces for their fate. Once martyrs and victims, they now can recognize the active participation they each played in the progression of their disease and own up to it. And when I say “they,” I am including myself in the bunch. (I may get up on a soapbox here for a sec, so bear with me.) I met up with a friend from high school this past week I had not seen since we graduated. We connected on Facebook a few years ago, and he was in town from Washington, D.C. , visiting family here. Kevin is a really good dude, and I was happy to see him. Understandably though, we spent a good chunk of our conversation over dinner chatting about other high school chums. “Whatever happened to …” and “Did you hear about …?” |
About Amy HiggsA former newspaper columnist, Amy takes her random, slice-of-life stories to the web. After 12 years, she's still just saying. Archives
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