Yep, that's me at age 8. I often imagined myself as a mermaid. I loved Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid. Even as a kid I was drawn to the dark beauty of this story. I loved the magic and the sacrifice. I also loved the long hair.
I remember taking my blue blanket (a twin-sized beauty with no ribbon edging left) and tying it around my head so that it would trail on the floor as my long, mermaid locks. I would sit side-saddle on my unicorn and race around the back yard discovering fairy kingdoms in the grape arbor. It was awesome.
And I didn't know until much later on (Like probably high school) how amazingly geeky I really was. I was just cluelessly happy in my little world. A couple of good friends who enjoyed my hair-brained ideas for fun, and I was good to go.
I can't even tell you how many nights I spent in the back yard playing Ouija and lighting candles in my pubescent years. And, now, as an adult I look back to that magic with longing and joy. In fact, I will still, on occasion, light the odd candle in the backyard and summon some spirits - mostly those sold in bottles with corks, but spirits none-the-less - I have not grown up too much, really.
But, like the writer, Eric Poole, I turn to different magic these days. I have, as chronicled here, gone through many of my own life-changing issues in the last few years, and I totally know what Poole is talking about. I found myself more than once in this dark (not the cool, goth kind) place beating myself up over decisions made or chances taken, wearing my "poverty... like a badge of honor," and spending more time than not cursing those who had wronged me. What a waste of time and energ.y.
And, looking back now, I can tell you the day, maybe even the moment, it turned around. It was the day we found out we were being foreclosed. A big day. A scary day.
Brett and I sat in the basement of our house and nervously danced around the issue. We were so tense, neither of us wanting to start a fight about what we were going to do, who was at fault or whatever other useless yelling could have taken place but didn't. And, although I may remember it wrong, I feel like we said it at the same time, "We just have to let it go."
It's such a simple sentence. And it really applied to more than just the house. All of it...we had to just let all of it go. We had to stop beating ourselves up and feeling like victims and failures for the position we found ourselves in. We had to look forward, make decisions and move on.
We had to let it go. The house. The "urban hipster" life. The idea of who we were supposed to be. None of it mattered anymore. We had to stop talking the victim talk and walking the failure walk. We had a family to think about. We were done making bad decisions. We were going to take our lives back and stop covering our faces when bad things happened. And in that moment, we had more to be happy about than we could see.
We made a plan. We stopped talking about the negatives, and magically our lives began to turn around. Yes. There have been backslides. Yes. There have been bumps. And, yes. Our lives are 100x better than they were 2 years ago. Partly because we have changed the "plan". We have shifted our priorities, and we are talking about can happen instead of what has happened.
Everything changes. Everything. It is the one thing you can plan on. And I fully believe that we have the power inside us to make every change a positive one. I totally understand that it can be hard in the moment to see the positive, but it's there. I promise. If I can say, "bankruptcy and foreclosure improved my life." I'm pretty sure, I know what I'm talking about. Or maybe I'm still just that goofy 8-year-old riding on a unicorn and discovering fairies. I'm cool with that too.
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