In answer to a question on OK Cupid: No, I have no idea what my “goal” is, I’ll be the first to admit. Maybe that’s part of my problem. Maybe it’s one reason the Frenchman left me… Because I’m so “trifling,” a wonderful word a friend use to say. Though in fairness, my ex never said anything like that to me.
I am heart-broken over being rejected by my now ex-boyfriend of 2 years, a man I honestly thought I’d marry one day. I thought he was happy, and it turned out… He wasn’t. And that was that, and my best friend and an amazing person I spoke to and bonded with, day in and day out, for seven hundred-plus days, is gone. How one wraps their head around such a reversal of fortune, I have yet to understand. If I keep posting , I’ll be writing plenty about him to come, I’m sure…
Things aren’t all bad though.
I have a decent job, for a big bank, an industry that isn’t going anywhere, especially once Bernie lost the ’20 Democratic primaries (charade that they were…). I have an incredible boss and manager. I work with nice people. I make a decent salary and benefits. I’m even (finally) saving for retirement at the not-at-all-young age of 47 (soon to be 48), though I’m so behind where I should be at my age that I try to avoid thinking about my startling shortfall. (I’m at about a fifth of where I should be. A FIFTH.)
I rent a nice apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a safe, and, in places, pretty, neighborhood, not (yet) gentrified, friendly and providing a pretty view of the city. My apartment is comfortable and cozily decorated, with my little “treasures” that I’ve bought on past trips to Morocco, Egypt, Cambodia and elsewhere and gifts from India on display. I have my shelves and shelves of books, though I’ve only read a fraction of them. My overflowing shelf of journals through the years, which I’ll dip into from time to time.
I come from a good and loving family. I have friends — most of them these days, I’ve lost touch with, spread to the four winds, but there are still some people I connect and spend time with fairly regularly.
I’ve had a decent education, from a prestigious prep school and an excellent college, Emory University, in Atlanta.
I do yoga regularly and am actually at my lowest weight in fifteen years, if you can believe it — and assuming the large pepperoni pizza I demolished in one sitting doesn’t change that; in fact, I’m even no longer overweight based on my BMI, for the first time in fifteen years.
I meditate; it helps some.
I smoke weed in the evenings to calm myself before bed. And to escape.
I have my travels, which I think about all the time. Nothing lined up yet for the future though, and I’m (understandably, I think) hesitant to do so, given our topsy-turvy pandemic world, though I managed to travel to Croatia for 8 days recently, which was marvelous and just what I needed. So I know it’s possible. (My ex dumped me right after the trip.)
And I’m reasonably healthy. I just beat an auto-immune disorder I’d been treating for the past year and a half. I do suffer from at least occasional depression, which has been the case since I was essentially a teen. The only time as an adult that I really remember being consistently happy and no longer depressed was when I began running, with gusto, after getting on anti-depressants for the first time as an adult, and felt such freedom and escape and pride in it, running a half-marathon, the Peachtree Road Race with family in Atlanta… Now that my weight’s the lowest it’s been in years, I’m tempted to give it another try and just see what happens. Though when I had more weight on me, my patella (knee) bone kept slipping out of place, which was alarming. (A laugh emoji would go here — I guess Medium doesn’t offer them?)
