The Lich Queen Muses

This is one of those nights.

One of those nights when I breathe in the cool air and soak up the darkness and I feel like everything’s going to be okay.

One of those nights when I examine the fucked up mess that is my life lately and I see all the beautiful things.

One of those nights when I think about moving to Asheville and I’m not dwelling on how hard it’s been, I’m thinking about how much it feels like I was just coming home.  Coming back to my roots.

The past year has been hard.  I’m not going to pretend like it hasn’t, or that the next year won’t continue to be so.  Something good that came into my life is about to leave it again, and I’m not happy about that and dealing with it is going to be rough, but I was thinking back over the past few months and I feel like all of it brought me back to myself.

I mean, it’s weird, right?  A few months ago I went on a couple of dates with a guy only to have him ditch me without a word, and that’s what pushed me back to myself.  That’s what woke me up again, after being buried for so long.

I was looking at something I wrote a year ago:

At some point in your life, someone is going to come along and make you wish you were different. In that moment, it will be easy, probably, to think you can be different, that you can be something (or someone) other than what you are. But thinking that is dangerous, because most of the time the thing you want to change is one of your fundamentals; one of the things that you have always been and will always be. Changing your fundamentals is like ripping yourself up by the roots. It’s hard, and it’s painful, and in the end you never quite feel like yourself. You can’t ever get grounded again, while you’re being this person, no matter how much you try.

It took me until just a couple of months ago to find my feet again.  I didn’t realize it at first, I couldn’t really tell until I was myself again that something had been horribly wrong.  (I also posted about that when it happened, when I snapped back into place.)  And I came back to life because some guy was a douche (not because he didn’t want to date me, because frankly we were horribly incompatible, but for the way he handled it), and one day I looked back on the little bit of time I had wasted with that guy that I didn’t even like all that much, and I thought, “What am I doing?  Why am I acting like this?”

And because that guy ditched me, I figured out how to be myself again.  And because I was myself, I found out that I could be that with someone and not have them wish I was something different.  That I could be allowed to open up slowly, comfortably, while another person waited patiently for it to happen.

I’m not one of those “Everything happens for a reason” people.  I think that’s pretty much bullshit.

But sometimes good things come out of the bad, and in this case almost a whole year of bullshit ended up restoring something inside me that I had given up for all the wrong reasons.

The next few weeks aren’t really going to be easy for me.  But for a (very) little while, everything was great, and I know that it will be again.

A year ago today I was a shadow of myself, and tonight I’m back — fully, in the flesh, a little sensitive and overly dramatic and rough around the edges, but me.  No matter what happens next, that’s something for which I am so, so thankful.