Another six-month check-up

It will be two-and-a-half years on Monday, and as I've found myself doing the last eighteen months, for the third time, I reflect back on the "progress" I've made in the preceding six-month span.

A year ago, when I started doing this internal check-up, I was in the midst of reading Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking and, more or less, sobbing hysterically as I did. It was, in retrospect, a good cathartic experience, although I didn't exactly think so at the time.



I'm pleased to note that there are days where the speed of the loss of insanity -- I refuse to call it a return to sanity quite yet -- leaves me utterly breathless, and in a very good way.



Apart from being back at work, doing something I love and that I'm reasonablly competent at (and perhaps most importantly, returning to financial independence), I find myself starting to think about what I want to do with the rest of my life. Of all the parts of my old self to return, this one has been one of the more surprising, and, in some ways, one of the more stunning, hallmarks of change.

I'm still working on the what and the how, but I quite like the idea of "a future" now. Most importantly, I know what, and who, I don't want, and where I do want to be, in my life, and that makes a monumentally huge difference in what happens next.



Reading my journal (the pen-and-paper one where all the thoughts that aren't for public consumption) for the last year has helped me a great deal in sizing up how far I've come -- even my handwriting is more legible -- and in working on a few projects that I look forward to creating before the end of the year.

An additional part of the return has been moving everything from one storage location to another, and being so excited to be able to see old friends in the form of my possessions again. There are some of them I'm not sure I want to keep any more, some I have missed dearly, and some I thought about getting rid of but now want to be reacquainted with.



Now, more than ever, I just want to carry them into my own home and unpack.

Four cabin walls would be just right for me....