For me, living alone is amazing for so many reasons. Foremost, my deepest neurosis' have total permission to come out and play. All former inhibitions. Including the personal commitment I try to make to my housemates and relations of self imposed sanity and consideration fly out the door directly behind their moving trucks. I'm like a spider just waiting to spin a web in all four corners. I'm also like a moth flit flit flitting all around the house. Perching here, then there, with multiple projects happening at every table and in each chair.
It is a supremely powerful feeling to realize upon returning home, that indeed every item is precisely where I have left it. Every object in the house continually remains untouched, unmoved from the exact position in which I have placed it. The crystals in the fruit bowl, check. The amazing vintage cut-glass goblet on the mantle, check. The panties in the bathroom, check. It is like overnight I have earned royal status. I have complete control over my material domain. I begin to wonder, does this jurisdiction extended to my spiritual and emotional realms as well? I begin early morning hikes which shortly turn into late mornings over a cup of tea. Then I begin longing for persons of conversational interest.
My dog is an excellent companion, but I begin thinking that I've started talking to her a little too much. Like when I find I'm answering my own questions for her, and she isn't even paying attention. So, OK. Sanity definitely left with that last moving truck. Its time to make some in-the-flesh friends for my mental health. This is an extremely grueling, all encompassing, expensive and exhausting task. For a girl who giggles with pleasure that the fish bowl is perfectly placed on its stand, interacting with other members of the human race (be they from other kingdoms or my own makes only a fractional difference). I am, oh so quickly reminded that a night on the town, while embraced with forced enthusiasm and an upbeat attitude, is nowhere in the same ball park as rocking out to my main stream hip hop tracks on full blast with my dancibilly dog, ready to shake the house down.
So, after about two months of this self realized infatuation with my personal hierarchy over my homestead, and self enforced socialization at the hippest (and the not so hip) spots in town, I begin to waver. I'm talking about a big seismic, undulating, tear my hair out at the roots sort of soul-quaking waver. I'm like beside myself with confusion. Like, what does this say about me spiritually? Emotionally? I start doing cleanses and exercising to improve my brain chemistry and balance emotional stress with healthy habits. Im like really on a roller coaster in the grand scheme. Whereas before I felt exuberantly happy, downright worrisome ecstatic all the time, I'm like now rocking back and forth between utter desolation and pure unadulterated meditative bliss. Its confusing as hell. I'm totally wondering what is the point to any of it, when I get this momentous wake-up calling. It went something like' "Merry Christmas."
Yeah, what? Your surprised this is all happening during the Holidays? I mean, I'd be impressed by anyone who is a hard enough nut not to crack even a little during this cold, dark, lonely, imposing time of year. So, its Christmas, and somewhere in the neurosis of my extremely productive time at living alone, being on my own and acting as an independent (yet self-realized, extremely needy) Modern Woman, I was able to get some important documentation completed and posted to further my career in the avenue of legal massage certification. Well, right away I have clients calling me. Im like, sure whatever. You got the right girl. Ill work the holidays. And from there, its like everything began to seem more effortless. I mean, given my client cancelled the last minute and left me waiting, home alone. But the point is, I got some Christmas cash in the mail for the same amount I would have, could have made. So, am I supposed to judge the Universe for providing those needed (direly) funds through a different source? I suppose the control freak in me would believe so. Luckily, she is busy rearranging the refrigerator magnets, which will remain perfectly untouched for eternity in my cozy, empty house. So, with the neurotic, lonely parts of myself occupied- personal needs fully met, I became able to gain a clear perspective.
Ive been judging myself way too harshly for, like ever and ever. I mean, who really gives a crap about my avenues of income? If I need fifty dollars to pay my electric bill, then what does it matter if that is my Christmas gift and I give out a free massage (which is what I did). I offered my X (who kindly took my sanity with his moving truck) the massage which was ready and waiting, on Christmas, when he returned to me my precious dog, whom he had kindly taken for the afternoon to kindly prevent her from trying to eat any prospectively paying clients. And that was that. My cozy, lonely home was once again full of all the beautiful challenges that arise against my personal need for space and independence. Yet, I realized that sometimes these challenges are really just the gifts we have been looking for. They are only rarely packaged in the way we might have pictured. Just so long as the ribbon is on straight, I can gain a lot more perspective from this new self-accepting, universally enlightening insight.
