Dear Diary,

Wow did I sleep a lot! My favorite part of every day is sleeping and dreaming. I am so tired all the time, and I never want to leave my dreams.

This morning I was dreaming that I was back in my old neighborhood, the one I grew up in. I was visiting my neighbor but it was really my mother's house. It was raining so heavily and I'd been walking through the mud. I looked back and saw all the muddy footprints I had left behind me, and then I was trying to clean them up. Other people came in and had a little dog with them and I was yelling at them to stay out of my way because I was cleaning. Then we all sat at the kitchen table and the hostess started to steam clean the carpet. It was terribly splashy and loud. My mother was there and finally I just told her, "Listen, I'm leaving." She didn't blame me and I asked some guy if he wanted to go with me. He was one of the characters from Scrubs.

Hmm. So that was it. There was another part where some boys (one of them was the neighbor's son) were threatening to fling a rubber band and hit me in the face. But the first boy missed and I flung the rubber band back at them and hit the second boy right in the cheek.

No huge insights from the dream dictionary on this one. They didn't consider that I'd be looking at my own footprints and cleaning them up. Originally as I was writing this, I thought that perhaps it was something about wanting to erase or "clean up" the past. I mean, my mother WAS in the dream...

I feel weird and like I could stay in bed all day. So tired. No energy. Maybe I'll get some. Ava wanted to see me, and also Amber. But somehow I never feel like getting back to Amber. She is not a very happy person overall. I feel like we are primarily friends because we met in a class several years ago and happen to live close to each other. That might be a terrible thing to say. But I feel I am on the brink myself and to hang around with an unhappy person just makes it worse.

I feel sometimes that I am still waiting for the end of the story. That there is something that is supposed to happen between M and me- there will be some kind of meeting, a decision... a dramatic ending of some kind. That he will at least be sorry and rue the day that he left me. That I will have accomplished peace and be able to walk away with some kind of dramatic flair. Or that we will get back together. But realistically I know that life is not always like that. Sometimes there is no dramatic ending. There's a very good possibility that I may never see him again... so what am I waiting for? I must not be used to having so much space in my life. I have to fill up that space with being here and now, rather than thinking about just biding my time.

I know I often feel like I made mistakes. But the truth is that everybody does the best they can in those moments. Sure, I know a lot more this year than I did last year- but so does everybody. That's how life works. Hindsight is always 20/20... in the moment, you are doing the best you can and feeling what you can.

If anything, the only big mistakes I made were trusting that things would get better. Trusting someone enough to love him and share my heart with him. I was never mean or discouraging. I was always loving and supportive. Those really aren't bad mistakes when you think about it. It takes a lot of courage. There were times I wasn't true to myself right after he broke up with me in August and then we kind of got back together without talking about it. I was so afraid, I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't tell him how afraid I was or how crazy it was making me. That's one way I abandoned myself. But I can see now how that tapped into all my huge fears.

Right now, in these moments, I have choices about staying with myself. When I worry about him too much, wonder what he thinks about me, that is abandoning myself. It is giving him all the power and saying that I am only worth something if he cares about me. And that isn't true. I mean, I was able to heal from the breakup with Frank. Now I don't know if Frank thinks about me, cares about me or not- but I figured out that I am worth something regardless of how he treats me. Same with Alphie. I now value myself more than I value him, and it used to be the other way around. I used to feel so devastated when he wouldn't shine his light on me.

The task here is to make myself the constant- make myself the One, and not wait for someone to come along and illuminate me, but to trust that I am enough, more than enough, in each and every moment of each and every day. And that starts with trusting the choices I make for myself and the intuitions that I have. And believing that I am wonderful, even when I am alone. And knowing that the reason so many men have left me is because I have my own doubts about myself that have been vibrating on the surface, attracting men who would reflect them back to me so I could heal them.

It's the big challenge. This is a huge piece of my life. I'm finally getting to the bottom of it. That can be looked at as something exciting! Kind of like suffering from an illness for a very long time and now one has discovered that it is in the bone. It is time to go in there and heal it.... and it's painful... and takes a while... but once it is healed it is healed at the core and it doesn't come back again. The symptoms never reappear.

So I'm back at the beginning, looking at this as an opportunity. Some people never take this one. They choose not to see it or they just never embark on the journey to get there. This journey doesn't have a map, so I don't really know what to do. So I guess it requires trust in something bigger than myself. Something bigger than me brought M into my life to show me exactly what needs to be healed, so I have to trust that something bigger than me will help me through the journey. The frustration and pain are actually part of the healing- probably stuff that has been there all along but I have resisted feeling it.

And often I feel sad, very sad. Like I've lost my soulmate. And I guess I need to trust that if the Universe loves me enough to heal me, that it loves me enough to give me another chance at love. M or someone even better. Someone better than I can imagine. That's part of the fun of being alive, I guess- you can be surprised that you get something better than you expected.

I am waiting to feel joy in my life again, but I guess first I have to feel all the pain that has been festering at the bone. Till it's just not there anymore...

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