We all get a chance – some of us many chances – to walk through the door of new opportunity.  Or maybe renewed opportunity.  Sometimes it may be a new view of the old opportunities.  Sometimes it’s just the culmination of all the information we may have gleaned from our life experience shaped into a doorway with the door open.
The doorway will look different to each of us but the experience will be pretty much the same.  We assess our situation and we either choose to walk through the doorway or hover back – lingering in the comfort of “Christmas Past” – a little in fear of taking that next step into something we aren’t sure of.
The last four years for me have been many doorways…most of them with doors that were locked and bolted.  I have found that in the past few months a few of these doors have been unlocked.  Some were opened.  And some were just nothing more than doorways that I could have walked through any time.  But because I was afraid – I held back…I lingered in the comfort of my old ideals and core beliefs…taking comfort in my fear.
Comfort in my fear, you say?
Yeah – comfort in my fear that I would never fit in.  Or that no one would ever love me the way I was.  Or that I was too old.  Or that I wasn’t smart enough.  Or I didn’t have the right education. Maybe I wasn’t strong enough.  That I didn’t matter enough.  That what I thought wasn’t important.  That I had no right to feel the way I did.  Mostly it was a wave of inadequacies that threatened to wash me out to see.
The past few months have been different.  At first I thought it was everybody else changing their perceptions.  Of course I thought this.  But this past week I realized it was me who had changed.  Everyone else have remained the same.  The universe – in it’s infinite wisdom – gave me a different view of the lay of the land and I saw the piece I had been missing all along.
Self acceptance.  I can preach self acceptance and the importance of loving yourself, but I wasn’t living it.  I was letting old beliefs and old habits and the way I thought other people thought about me to block my ability to move forward.  But this week – a week where nothing happen – everything happened.  This week the locked, bolted and boarded up door to my future was revealed to be nothing more than a mirage.  It wasn’t real.
And – as always happens with my AHA moments…there wasn’t a lot of fanfare – no fireworks or bolts of lightening…no breaking down…no tears…no screams…no sac-cloth and ashes…just a quiet voice in my head that said…”Once you walk through that door – there’s no turning back.”
It’s taken me a week and a half to fully embrace the idea that my old life is over and my new life holds promise I never imagined.  I’ve got some cobwebs to sweep out…and some housecleaning to do.
I need to finally take that college algebra class that scares me so much and has blocked my ability to get a degree.  I need to commit to regular and intensive therapy…not just pleasant conversations with somebody I like.  I need to quit expecting my fairy godmother to fill my bank account with enough cash to take care of my girls…and I need to just let go of every comfort that isn’t good for me.
Ordinarily – just saying the word “algebra” would have been enough to send me scampering back behind the “curtain of ignorant behavior”.  I always thought that it wasn’t so much that my left brain didn’t work – I thought I might not even have one.  But somehow – all of the past years came down to simply seeing the truth.
I’m a little scardy cat.  Big talker I am…but just for show.  I secretly wrote a poem after my first relationship with a boy didn’t go so the way I wanted.  We were together for about three weeks but I had already planned our wedding and shopped for a house, furnished it and named our kids.  But now I’m reading it to myself because I am my own advocate.

I don’t want to be your Friday Girl.
Shower Fresh…Perfumed.
A Girl for All Occasions.
Don’t you want to know my Mondays?