This whole “rebuilding my life” process isn’t going as smoothly as I hoped it might.

Partially I blame grief, but when you grieve as long and as deep as I have it’s easy to blame grief for everything. Grief is like just getting out of the shower on a cold morning when the heat hasn’t kicked on yet, and someone throws a towel over your head. You’re wet and cold. You can’t see anything because there’s a fucking towel over your head, and your only thought is that you want to get warm and dry as soon as possible. You can’t see past that relief, but figure everything will be great once you can warm up and get the damn towel off your head.

Okay that was a really stupid analogy, but let’s just say I thought everything would be okay once the worst of my grief was over (because let’s be real – grief is never really over).

When things were terrible, a lot of people told me that “good things were coming” and I was “due” some good luck. So much so, that I began to believe it.

False. Believe nothing once you get the towel off your head. All you should believe is that there’s a decent chance you might step in some dog vomit on the way to the dresser before you even manage to get your underwear on.

Something that has taken me an overwhelmingly long time to understand is that the world doesn’t owe you anything. Just because something bad happened to you, doesn’t mean something good is necessarily going to happen to you next. There is no balance. It’s all random. I grieved this realization almost as much as I grieved Tim.

But this is starting to sound like a depressing post, and I don’t mean it to be. I’m not depressed. Instead, I think a lot about things in the past that I didn’t understand.

Back before he got depressed and relapsed, the biggest thing Tim and I argued about were the dishes. The dishes were “his” job, and he hated doing them. He would put them off and I would try to cook with dirty pots everywhere, which frustrated me to the point that I became a “cleaning martyr” (his words… fairly accurate) and then we would argue. In the heat of that, Tim would often stop.

“You know… I’m not a bad husband,” he said as he angrily scrubbed.

“I never said you were,” I replied.

“I wish you had dated more people before me, so you had a better comparison.”

“I wish you would do the dishes more often.”

I think about those conversations a lot. Mostly how he was right, and I took for granted a lot of what made Tim so great to me. He always respected me, and treated me like he did. When we first started going out, he made it clear he was interested. He wasn’t afraid of commitment. There were no games or endless games of text tag. Sure, some of that is because texting wasn’t the entity it is now back in 2006, but mostly we wanted to see each other – so we did.

Before I started dating again, I genuinely thought that’s how things worked. If you met someone you liked, and they liked you too – you spent time together to see what might happen.

HA. HA HA HA HA HA!

I could write a lot of things in this post, but I’m not for a variety of reasons. Instead, I’m going to give you a list of things in my life that have been so much easier than dating.

Getting lead changes on Simon.

Writing a book about the darkest, most vulnerable moments of my life.

Selling a house and buying another one within 90 days.

Setting up an a deceased’s estate with no will or financial information.

Getting accepted into multiple fully funded graduate school programs.

Remembering all of my jumper courses and not going off course once in an entire weekend.

Catching a ride on the Tardis and traveling forever through time and space.

Okay, so I haven’t accomplished that last line item, but I do think it would be easier. Until then, I’ll be toiling around here per normal doing the best I can trekking around in the knee deep mud that is life. Sometimes I have a towel over my head, but mostly not these days. I have a lot of things I’m sitting on that I can’t wait to write about and share with y’all, but I’ve got to stay mum for a while longer.

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