The Start of a New Year... and more

It is the start of a new year and hopefully the start of a new me. I know everyone claims to have grand new years' resolutions and then promptly breaks them five minutes later, but I am one determined woman. I am thirty years old, which may not sound that old to most people but to the sixteen year old I was once upon a time, it sounds practically ancient. I'm starting this blog as a way of jumpstarting my everyday writing and as a way of sharing who I am and who I hope to be.

Let me start with who my sixteen year old self dreamed I would be by this age. According to that know-it-all braniac, I was supposed to have it all together by now. My two children and husband would greet me at the door as I came home from either my high profile job as a top doctor or an award-winning writer each day. The husband who greeted me would be both handsome and well-rounded. He would rub my feet after a tough day, but still want to take me out for the occasional night on the town to show me off. We would be each other's best friends and all my friends would be jealous of how devoted he was to me. Okay, so I know that guy sounds like every woman's fantasy. That guy probably doesn't exist, right? But to the young me, he was still in the realm of possibility. An attractive man who adored me sounds about as unlikely to me now as launching myself to the moon, but romance when you are young is a far different thing.

I suppose that's the saddest part to me, how cynical I have had to become compared to the romantic I once was. I was always the good girl, the girl with her head in the books, but I actually managed to be decently popular too. I was involved in everything in high school and had tons of friends. Even though I wasn't cheerleader pretty, I was considerably confident in who I was and what I wanted. I had no boyfriends and frankly could have cared less about having one. I had one goal in mind: getting out of my small town and having that exciting future I had always dreamed of. Well, I got the scholarship out of there, but my life is not quite as full of excitement as I once dreamed of.

My first road block came in college when I met my first love. Instead of doing the smart thing and falling in love with the guy across the hall, I fell in love with my best friend's brother. He was in the army and to my eyes, ridiculously handsome. I will never forget the night he first noticed me. I was reading a lot of romance novels at the time, so everything seemed momentous. He would come visit his sister and I was always just his little sister's friend. I was really beneath his notice and I remember laying awake at night in my dorm room trying to think of ways to get his attention. The opportunity finally came when we went to a fraternity halloween party my sophomore year of college. He was on leave and I was finally ready to make my move. I dressed in what I guess could be described as a prostitute's outfit. Ironically enough, his sister helped me pick it out. I had a short black skirt and high black boots on, that made my somewhat chunky legs actually look sexy. I wore my hair loose, which I never did, and plastered more makeup on than a circus clown. I looked good though, and I knew it. The minute he saw me in that getup, the stage was set. He didn't let me out of his sight the whole night. We danced and laughed, and I fell a little bit in love that night. Over the next two years, I fell more in love and it seemed that he did too. Unfortuntely, we also brought out the worst in each other. I barely got to see him. He was jealous, I was jealous, etc., etc., etc. Honestly, he was a bit of an asshole. He began the string of assholes who would last until well, pretty much right now. I learned a lot from that relationship, and I learned that the fairy tale isn't always true. That was the first time life didn't turn out like a romance novel. Sadly, it wasn't the last.

Sometimes, I want to turn back time and be that girl again. I want to have her confidence that everything will turn out in the end. The last few years have kind of beat that notion out of me. I am a professional woman with independence, but I am definitely not that woman that I dreamed of. I am starting a search this year to hopefully find love, maybe a more practical one than I dreamed of once upon a time, and also to find a part of myself that I lost a long time ago. I lost that ability to believe in myself and to just draw strength from who I am and what I am blessed to have. Hopefully, I can find that ability again, with or without someone special.