My Muchness

 Part of the pain of infertility was wanting to relive my childhood through my children, and desperately finding ways to relive that childhood without them once I realized that we were never having children. 

This was one of the reasons I decided I needed a change. It’s what prompted my word of the year…upheaval. 

I’ve come to realize that I’m a different person. Who I was as a child compared to who I am now…are two completely different people. 

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day and told them that if someone told me that they had broken their foot at the top of the mountain and hiked over three miles on that foot, I would have exclaimed, “I could never do that!”

But I did. 

If someone would have told me in high school about everything I would have to endure once I graduated, I would have exclaimed, “I could never survive that!”

But I did. 

I survived it all. 

The little girl who couldn’t sleep without a stuffed animal or a doll (and when I was really little I slept with several), who was kind to the point she was a doormat, who was in all the fine arts, who laughed at silly things and cried at even sillier things, who had her heart broken in so many ways and so many times…the girl who spent years trying to figure out why people didn’t like her…she faded into the shadows long ago. 

This journey I’m on might be new…but I’ve been trying to find my true self since 2006. 

Over the last eight years, I found a strength within myself that I never knew existed. I stopped singing. I stopped acting. I only danced every once in a while when I used to dance in the rain regularly. I stopped writing. And, worst of all, I gave up quite a few big dreams. 

We all know that plans change and things don’t always go as planned. Some of us are living, breathing proof. 

I once said that I lost my “muchness”. (That’s an Alice in Wonderland reference for those of you who don’t know.) The truth of the matter is that I never found it in the first place. 

I have found solice in writing, and I think that is the small piece of myself that I am keeping from my younger days. The rest I’m letting go. It’s time to find my muchness.