Because sometimes you just gotta vent!

Because sometimes you just gotta vent!

It’s not easy for me to vent my feelings, complain, gripe or out right bitch. I spent too many years learning how to do things for the greater good and not for my own. In that interim of more years than I care to admit to, I learned a few valuable things.

1. Families are our love, but they are not our lives. If we don’t do what we need to do, in the years that follow; we will be sorry.

2. You can’t blame anyone for your failure to do what you want but yourself. We are singular creatures who exist in our own unique orbits. While others do intersect within our lives boundaries, they are not cause nor effect. We do that all by ourselves.

3. No one can force you to do anything against your nature. If you screwed the pooch, you did it; not Joe Blow down the street. Saying “I fucked up” ranks right up there in the ether as one of the hardest things to say. “I’m sorry” is easy, too easy and too many of us fall back on it.

4. Eat when you eat, cry when you cry, walk when you walk, give each infinitesimal moment of your life your total attention. If your walking and eating/talking at the same time, you are liable to fall on your ass.

5. My favorite all time invention…internet…followed closely by text phones. I am deaf at this point in my life. I spent a half century in the hearing world and now I feel I have been boned, in the most painful way. My music has gone from ”I love to play”  to “even percussion hurts my ears.” I can’t hear my husband, my kids, my grand kids or the gurgling laughter of my great-grand kids. I still however can text, read, and see. In the long run, it will be enough.

6. Create anything you can from art to treasures, you are human, you are great… 

7. If you think 60 is old, you are living in the wrong century. I fully believe I owe each of my kids, (or do they owe me?) eighteen years of love, pain, heartache, happiness, strife, and debating arguments. At that rate I am good for at least a hundred and forty years. Pssst....I intend to make good on every one of them.

I used to paint, a lot. I recently switched to water soluble oils so I could paint more. Lately it’s been…”I don’t have time.” “I don’t have a place to paint.” The truth is I haven’t had the motivation I used to have. I find it hard to just sit down and get it done. Then I look at the paintings I've done or read a story I wrote years ago and I wonder “Where did she go?”

She is the person I always thought I'd be. Somewhere in raising the kids, taking care of the house, working for a paycheck; I lost her. Some days I think I see her off in my peripheral vision. Standing at the edge of my life. I want to call her back. Yes, I know; that boat has sailed.

Love who you love, help, contribute and work….but above everything at the end of the day be yourself. You are unique and don’t loose that person like I did. It’s a bitch to get it back.