Celebrate the Small Things – 04.16.16

I am a day late celebrating this week. You can read why HERE, so I don’t have to rehash the details. There’s not much to celebrate from this past week, but here are just a couple of things.

I am celebrating my continued Science Fiction flash fiction pieces over at Promptly Written for the A2Z. I think I’ve written some pretty good ones so far for the challenge and received some wonderful comments. Thank you!

I’ve also received some wonderful comments on this blog for my A2Z People Who Inspire Me posts. Thank you!

I was able to spend a few minutes with my niece Katie and her mother yesterday. It’s been months since I’ve seen either one and it was so good to see them and chat with them a few minutes.

And finally, I am celebrating the lifting of the dark cloud and deep funk that has been hanging over my head for the last couple of days (that’s the HERE link above).

What are you celebrating this week, dear readers? Feel free to share with me in comments.

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Each Friday, I join Lexa Cain and friends for a weekly blog-hop called Celebrate the Small Things, where we celebrate all of those small moments from the week before.

The wonderful co-hosts of Celebrate the Small Things are:
L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge
Tonja Drecker @ Kidbits Blog

Celebrate The Small Things Linky:

1.	Lexa Cain	2.	Fiction and Film
3.	Writing Off the Edge	4.	Kidbits
5.	TheCyborgMom	6.	Thoughts and Ideas from Deanie Humphrys-Dunne
7.	My Inner Geek	8.	Eclectic Alli
9.	Intentional Insights with S. Kelley Harrell	10.	Constantine
11.	My Miracle Life	12.	Writing, Reading, and the Pursuit of Dreams
13.	My Creatively Random Life	14.	Shells Tales and Sails
15.	Lara Lacombe	16.	TF Walsh
17.	Caring for my Veteran	18.	Life, Yoga and Other Adventures
19.	About myself, by myself	20.	Suzanne Furness
21.	Elizabeth Seckman	22.	Avalon
23.	Cherdo on the Flipside	24.	My Baffling Brain
25.	Planet Kimberly	26.	Shah Wharton
27.	Mere Joyce	28.	Victorian Scribbles
29.	Tanya Miranda	30.	God, Entertainment, & Annoying Things
31.	Ann – A Friend of Jesus 2013	32.	Special Teaching At Pempi’s Palace
33.	Square Pegs	34.	Patricia’s Place
35.	Yvonne Van Dalen	36.	Anne Higa
37.	My Antimatter Life	38.	Into the Imagination Vortex
39.	Bouquet of Books	40.	Lightravellerkate
41.	Curious As A Cathy	42.	Thoughts for the Day
43.	Julie Flanders	44.	As the Fates Would Have It
45.	Project Why

 

Concerning My Absence

I don’t like to air my grievances. Normally, this would be written in a private journal, but I feel that I owe it to my readers to explain my absence the past two days.

Those of you who know me know that my husband and I parted ways back in October 2014 and that I moved back home to Virginia and he has remained in Oklahoma. The nine years that I lived in OK were not good ones. I was very ill, physically and mentally, during those years. Some of it was from being homesick the entire time, some of it was due to my husband being a narcissist who made my life miserable, and other parts of it was that I had few friends there to help me. The mental illness that I have suffered from for most of my life became overwhelming in those years. I was suicidal, a cutter and burner, and hospitalized numerous times. It took a lot of therapy and determination for me to leave there.

Since I’ve returned home to my beloved Virginia, my health, physical and mental, has greatly improved. In fact, I’ve gone off of all of my psych meds. I am no longer stressed or anxious all of the time and I haven’t had any depressive episodes since the first week I returned home. Until two days ago, that is…

Two days ago, I received an email from my estranged husband (he and I have been on good terms since September 2015, having worked through most of our differences via email and phone). Before I left in 2014, he and I were renovating the house we lived in. He wanted me to stay until the renovations were complete, but I just couldn’t do it. This left some HUGE messes all over the house – primarily in the kitchen, main bedroom and bathroom. He still has not completed those renovations and because he is a pack rat, things have become worse. In his email, he asked me to come back to OK and help him finish the renovations and get the house back in order. You see, he has fallen into a deep depression since I left and hasn’t been coping well. He has also made some new discoveries about his sexual identity and that too has left him in a bit of a funk.

When the email arrived and I read it, a dark cloud descended upon me. I relived our entire life from April of 2005 when we arrived in OK until October 2014 when I left. I won’t go so far as to say I’ve been depressed, because I know what depression is and I know when I am in it, but my mood has soured and a darkness has surrounded me. The mere thought of returning to OK has crippled my ability to think, concentrate and even write. It really has nothing to do with him. We are in a good place now and I wouldn’t mind seeing him again, just not in OK. It is that place… that house, that state. The thought “I nearly died there” keeps running through my head. I just cannot bring myself to go back there.

I struggled for two days about what to tell him. How to tell him no. I didn’t want to be the reason why depression would cripple him further. But the one thing I’ve had to learn about myself is my limitations. I can no longer do things to please someone else that are detrimental to my own health and well-being. So after living with this dark cloud for two days, I finally replied to his email this morning and told him NO and I told him why – because of what OK represents to me about my health. I know he will not receive the news well and I will regret hurting him and letting him down, but I will stand firm behind my answer and my reasons.

And so, dear readers, I have felt the lifting of the cloud today. Thankfully, I had scheduled ahead many of the posts you’ve all been reading the last couple of days.. here on this blog and on my other two blogs. I’ve fallen behind in the NaJoWriMo, and both of the poetry challenges. So I will likely just skip the missed posts and carry on with the upcoming prompts. As time allows today, I will try to catch up with comments and get back to reading the A2Z blogs tomorrow on our day off. Thank you, if you managed to read this in its entirety. I know it is a long post.

Love & Blessings
Lori

#atozchallenge – Nelson Mandela Inspires Me

I’d heard of him as a teenager, but since politics wasn’t discussed in our house, I didn’t get to know much about Nelson Mandela until my mid-twenties. All that I knew of him at the time was that he was a lawyer and an activist. Somewhere along the way, I learned that he was a prisoner for helping his people in South Africa. I began researching him and learned that in South Africa, life for blacks was just as bad, if not worse, than life for blacks in the US. His acts of defiance often left him banned from certain areas and jailed in others. Nelson Mandela’s struggles for freedom for blacks’ rights were not often peaceful protests. His involvement in the ANC and with Communists often meant bloodshed on the road to freedom. He was imprisoned from 1964 until his release in 1990. After this time, his work to end Apartheid was met with International support. He was elected President of South Africa in 1994. Although I didn’t always agree with his and the ANC’s tactics, what I admired most about him was his desire to see everyone in South Africa live peacefully side by side, the whites and the blacks. This influenced my own beliefs that we should all be free people, everywhere and live in peace. Here are a few of my favorite Nelson Mandela quotes:

Here is a documentary showing the struggles of South Africa and Nelson Mandela:

Interesting facts: Mandela was friends with such leaders as Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi and Suharto. He was often called a Communist, even though he considered himself a Nationalist and supported a constitutional democracy. Mandela was awarded the The Nobel Peace prize in 1993.

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Thank you for joining me for the A-to-Z Challenge. If you’d like to see who else is participating, check them out here.

Each day, I will be posting about People Who Inspire Me.