Hope in the New Year

While there is no reason to believe today offers anything but itself, the day was stress-free, after worry that it would be a terrible day. This has made me wonder if this means the rest of the year will prove all my fears unfounded. Of course, it could also just mean to begin to expect the unexpected. Honestly, that latter one is exactly what I should focus on.

One thing I intend to keep from the end of June is my reclaimed sense that none of this really, truly matters. Not a bit of it means anything at all. I'll still be me, here, doing what I wish and what makes my life livable, long after the people that are around me now have left my life. I look back ten and twenty years to people that I thought mattered then, and see how none of them have any impact on me. They didn't then, either, but I didn't know it. It took losing everything to find out how little they mattered.

While I still give a lot of my precious "time to people who don't care if I live or die" I still get to go home and leave them all behind, at the end of my shift. No one comes home with me. As we are instructed to leave our personal matters at the door, before we enter work, (which never really happens all the way - most people just barely scrape by when they're having difficulties outside of work, even if they're old and think they're "over it") I leave work at that same door. Once I'm in my car, and my music is blasting, it acts like a shower, cleansing me of it all.

I will keep that perspective in the coming days and weeks. The "flatulent pain in the ass"  I feel sabotaged me has returned. But now? I don't care. As I was driving through the mountains in the storm, I realized that person meant nothing to me. The only people I care about are people who want to see me flourish. People who want to watch me flounder are worth exactly as much as the trash gathering in the dumpster outside. And like that trash, I'll let my brain cart them away from me.

Either you uphold your hollow words of support or you don't. I know that in the end, those who don't will be lost to the dustbin of dead neurons with a little time. There are people long gone, and though I know they were there, for the life of me, I can't think of any face or name to accompany the bad feeling they gave me. That's where those in the here and now will also end up.

I take that moment of freedom, and I will burn it like a torch before me throughout this coming year. That much I can promise.