how i got here

I didn't always live in a vintage Airstream travel trailer. I didn't always live in a trailer park in the desert Southwest. I used to have a house, a job, a garden, a cat in the soggy Pacific Northwest. What I think of as my sabbatical from real life looks like it will come to an end in April when I leave the Sea of Cortez with my silver (and now rusted) home in tow and head back to southern Arizona where I will look for a real job. Real life, real job. I don't know if I'll continue living in the trailer; it's feeling a little small after three years.

I was thinking about how I got here.

As much as I hate to admit it, how I had defined myself came from a place of not deserving to be loved. Just writing those words makes me cringe. egads! But it's true. And I'm not talking only romantic love but love of all kinds. For instance, I often felt that my friends didn't love me but that they merely tolerated me, that they had me around so they could talk about me later ("guess what she said this time!"). Then there was a time when I thought - seriously - that I was maybe retarded but no one told me, or I was too dim to recognize it. Obviously, that was from one of my lowest low periods. I mean, I don't usually think that I'm mentally challenged, and I know that's a bizarre thing to think about oneself, but that is how bad things had gotten for me. One time I was home sick from work (what great sentence structure...did work make me homesick? did I miss work, thus being 'homesick'? or was I "sick from work"? maybe I am a bit slow) and I watched Oprah. She was doing a show on women who felt too ugly to leave their houses. That was me. None of those women were ugly and I hoped that was true of me, too.

But anyway, how I got here has to start here:

When you believe that you will never be loved -
You pick men who don't love you
You tell yourself that you're happy alone
You are afraid to love anyone
family
friends
yourself
You relish your independence
You rarely ask for help or know how to accept it when it's offered
You focus on your flaws
You are embarrassed to go out
You become
isolated
thin-skinned
angry
You think about suicide.
You grab for a life preserver
You dig out an old dream
You make that dream happen
You wake to blue skies every morning
You are amazed that you can feel so happy
You attract people to you
You form intimacies
You let men give you things
You accept
massages
pedicures
angel food cake
You find you enjoy taking care of a man
You even fall in love with a dog
You have faith in the future
You look forward to the next adventure.

Even if it is real life, real job.