Is it possible to be both
healing | and | hurting?
fearful | and | hopeful?
creative | and | crushed?
bruised | and | beautiful?
groaning | and | growing?
amused | and | abused?
loved | and | lonely?
I am hoping so.
I recently had an event in my life I’m calling AHBL (all hell broke loose). It was a train wreck of the worst kind and, in truly cruel ways, it derailed some things that had given me hope and destroyed things I thought were real. Honestly, it is possibly the most painful thing – and for sure the most unfathomable thing – I have ever walked through. Am still walking through. Might be walking through for a long time, dang it.
And the annoying thing is, I’ve actually already walked through some crazy hard stuff. Oh well.
Anyway, if you’re new to this blog, and you wonder if I’m just a whiner or a drama queen once in a while, well, actually, I might be. Sorry. It’s hard for me to see objectively right now, so I’m really not sure. All I know is that, for some reason, AHBL has both debilitated me and energized me. I can’t explain it, but I’m going with it. I’m finding that it’s therapeutic for me to be honest right now, and to be who I am, in all the ways that I am Julie, and this is the forum that feels most comfortable and natural and healing for that at the moment.
Could be I’ll get down the road and realize, wow that blog thing was some misguided, ill-conceived idea and someone should have stopped me. I guess that’s the risk I’m taking.
I’m trying to just be where I am right now, and not pretend I’m someplace else. Sheesh you wouldn’t think that would be so hard.
I guess what I’m saying is that if you decide to hang around here, or come back for more, you’ll see a little bit of everything. You might get whiplash when I jump from everyday household moments to design makeovers to basically what amounts to tears in the form of words. (Then again, maybe that’s how most days can look for any of us?)
I totally get that it’s not comfortable to see someone’s pain so you can skip over those parts if you want, I won’t mind a bit. Or, you can know that yes there’s pain, and yes there’s also beauty and inspiration and the teeny-tiniest little bit of hope (or at least the hope of hope).
All at the same time.
And this is where I must acknowledge that if I was walking this alone, my words would be entirely different.
Thank God that I’m just one of three mugs at the coffee-shop table when I need to cry or vent or know that there are other lives going on besides just mine right now, and that those other lives have their Both/Ands too. We’ve all got our journeys…. So a shout out to the girls, who have been by my side through this. And all the others of you who have too.
Anyway, welcome to this journey. And believe me, I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m the only one on a journey like this, or that my pain matters more than anyone else’s. I know we all walk this path at some level, at some point, in some way. You might be walking yours right now. If so, I’m both sorry and I’m with you. I hope I don’t offend you or hurt you or mislead you with any of my thoughts or words. They are just mine. I’m just me.
But maybe, just maybe, together we will have the freedom to share both the good and the hard.
Or maybe this whole thing is just about me, and you will be hopelessly bored and I should be left here to blog on my own in private, which I’m fine with too.
Or maybe it’s a little of both. Maybe it really is The Both And.
by Julie Rybarczyk (re-bar-chek)
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