Only me...

Some days I feel like I have wasted the last 20 years.  I mean, I know that I did the right thing, but sometimes I think that maybe if I had made different choices, my life would be different right now.  I can step back in time to 2008 when I first landed in Nashville, TN.  I was very optimistic about life.  I was prepared to get a good job and start living a good life.  Somewhere along the way, something happened.  My feelings changed.  I do not know whether it was my mom going back north or me starting school.  I look back and feel like I was an imposter.  I was not being me.  I was learning about myself, but I was not being true to my nature.  I felt guilty.  I felt like I had forsaken my duty and tried to take some time for me without consideration for anyone else.  In doing so, I feel like I set into motion a set of circumstances that has forever jaded me into a feeling of unworthiness and fakery. 

First, I left NH with my mom after my dad died to get a change in scenery and perhaps begin to live anew.  I got a decent temp job with a company and made some pretty ok money.  Over a short time (like 4 months), mom began to miss home and decided she was leaving.  I could not go as we had signed a lease and I had started school.  Thus begins my failure as a person.  Soon after, mom went back to NH or Maine and I tried to live alone.  For the first time in my life, the only person I needed to worry about was me.  I thought I would be ok.  I got a different job working on computers.  It was a nearly perfect situation.  I had a car, a nice apartment, a decent job, and I was ok.  Then the recession happened. 

All at once, my life crumbled.  The company I was working for started mass lay-offs, which included me, and suddenly I could do nothing.  I was still in school though and luckily qualified for work-study (which incidentally had nothing to do with what I was in school for, but it paid the bills).  Suddenly I am forced to downsize to a studio apartment, getting food assistance, and dong this work-study while trying to do something with myself.  After a little while, things settled into a steady rhythm.  I went to class, I went to work, and I tried to live a life.  I made a few friends in school.  At some point, I met Joe. 

Joe it turned out, would be the love of my life.  I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with him.  He was my everything.  Suddenly nothing else mattered as long as I had Joe.  For about a year, I was happy.  Completely and totally happy.  Never in my life had I felt that content with anything.  I knew that no matter what life threw at  me, it would be ok because I had Joe.  Then mom started getting sicker.  I had to make the hardest choice of my life.  I had to leave.  Joe had all his family there in TN and he could not leave, but I had to. This was September 2011.  I finished my schooling and had to make tough decisions.  Though in retrospect, there really was no decision to make.  It was expected that I move back to my mom.  So I said goodbye to Joe and Nashville.  Since then, my life has sucked.  I since developed the deepest depression of my life and faced the hardest time I have ever endured.  Not only did I lose my Joe, but my mom died in November of 2013. 

To many, this seems like a complaint...a woe is me type of thing.  I really do not want anyone to say anything about this.  I just want it understood that what I had given up and what I have left.  There is a legitimate reason I feel the way I do.  It is not in my head and I do not have to pretend to be ok if I am not.  I am who I am and will be who I am.  If you do not like it, then do not follow me.  Do not try to tell me how to "get over it." 

I will not pretend to be ok.  I will not be someone that another person wants me to be.  I am only me.