New Dawn, New Day, New Life

Photo: The Blue Marble NASA
(with color corrections by Deglr6328)

Nina Simone's
Feeling Good 

Everything in life involves some sort of trade-off.  I got my health back after my year-long, horrific ordeal with pain, nausea, and the meds required to live with both, at a cost of five surgeries performed in the space of about 3 hours and 8 full weeks of recuperation and medical restrictions.

After what my surgeon assured me really was a near-death experience, faced with the fact that both my parents and all my grandparents are now dead and there was no one left whom I could not bear to disappoint, I decided it was time to admit the truth, first to myself, then to the world, and come out as a lesbian. Obviously, the cost was a divorce from the heterosexual marriage in which I had been trying and spectacularly failing to live, but the end of that chapter came as a relief to all parties.

I am in one of the more LGBTQ-friendly states in the Union, hopefully to stay put for a while this time. Hello again, Colorado; I didn't expect to be here again, Denver, but I'm learning to love you very much all the same. However, the cost of this colossal move is that, since my ex-husband is still unemployed and therefore cannot pay either the child support or alimony to which we agreed, I am indigent, homeless (sleeping in a friend's basement--God bless you eternally, faithful friend!), on government aid, may soon have to relocate to a long-term homeless shelter, and am separated from my daughter while I find us a home. She is living with her paternal grandparents in another part of the Denver Metro area, so I get to see her (when I can find the gas money to drive there--thank you so much, helpful and supportive friends!), but the missing her is a very real physical ache at times.

My student loan mess was finally resolved, as my loans were forgiven. Yes, you read that right. Loans have been discharged. I just had to be diagnosed with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and panic disorder, have horrific nightmares for three years, occasional flashbacks, and other delightful symptoms that have made it impossible for me to work for the past six years before the Department of Education would agree that in my case, discharging my loans was an appropriate course of action. 

They are all costs worth paying, in the end--to get my health back, to be my genuine self, to see my daughter fed and cared for until I am back on my feet, to find therapy for my past traumas and begin rebuilding a life. That does not make any of them easy.  If ever I have experienced a baptism by fire, this has been it. But when it is all finally lived through, and the ash clears from the reverberating implosions of a false life and disingenuous identity I had constructed for myself, I am left with this thought.

"It's a new dawn

    It's a new day

      It's a new life

        for me...

And I'm feeling good."

I will read, I will write, I will crochet, and I will tell all of you all about it. It's good to be back. I hope you have stuck with me for the journey.