I spend the majority of my days reevaluating my life. It’s not always pretty. I have a lot of failures along the way, and in my mind they’re capitulated within the last five years. I lost my marriage, quit my career early, lost a relationship, and have experienced a strain with my children, all created in my own actions. I’m not looking for advice, just using this as a platform to release some of my demons. I guess. My life today is so completely different than it was even five years ago. I’m alone, I have a dog, and I’m retired. I might not direct another theatre production in my life, and I will always feel I retired too early from the stage. That was my blood, and not producing a show with a talented group of students is very hard on me. Now all that being said, I really don’t know who reads this blog so there may be some of you that this comes as a surprise to, others not so much. 

I do have two beautiful children that I am fortunate to call my own. We created a lovely family together and that can never be denied. I also have wonderful grandchildren with another on the way. I’m fortunate to experience those things given the way my marriage fell apart. So now I spend my days trying to go forward. It’s just not as easy as I wish it would be, so sometimes I feel it’s like karma for the mistakes I made in my life. I try to recognize myself as a good person, but I’m the first person to rip the bandage off. There are things that I wish I could do over and I can’t. I can only move forward and my greatest struggle the last couple of months has been figuring out how I might do that. I wait for God moments but I just don’t know when they are coming or how they will manifest themselves.

Perhaps this could be a chapter in my memoirist writing. Lately, I’ve been trying to imagine an outline and I’m so lost when alone, it’s difficult for me to imagine putting something together. It’s there somewhere I know it is, just have to find it and it’s going to take time. But I keep convincing myself it’s not that far away. The truth is, I feel in a better place to explore my flaws than I have for years. I do completely acknowledge my addictive personality playing a huge role in both my failures and successes. It’s allowing the latter to manifest itself that would be a benefit. 

I’ve been sober from alcohol for over 20 years and five years beyond the end of my marriage. I’m really pretty proud of that and I don’t really brag about it too often. I never bring it up with my family. I think they could sometimes care less, so I stopped looking to them for validation years ago. My kids know and I believe they do acknowledge it in their own quiet manner. To me, it feels very good and I am proud of it. If I’d kept drinking I would probably be dead by now. That’s just a fact I have to live with and I don’t think I am too far off the analogy. My remission of my addictions is very important to me.

So in closing tonight I don’t really know how to find purpose sometimes. It’s brainstorming like this I suppose. No poetry, just analysis.