Everything, everything I have counted on for all my years ended this year.
It wasn’t a surprise. My grandmother had tired of life. So she ended it. For the past year after her last hospitalization, the bad one; the one my sister, and mother and I dropped everything for, was preparation for this. The last holiday. The final act. A last wish that was so crazy, it left me with a reminder of it every time I leave my house, and a story that hurts to tell but just wants to be told. To finally, one last get-together, one that I had to cut short for my daughter. Meaning, painfully, that I might never see most of the family again.
A month later, I started to feel the freedom again. Memories from apps still bring up pictures, and I want to cry. Sometimes I do. I’m starting to pick up the routines when I can. Hindered by a mysterious shoulder injury and my anxiety, I’m trying to put out feelers. Trying to see if find my people.
I’m trying to write more, art more. Be more. Crawling out of the quagmire of work, pushing through the pain of rejection.
Last year, I thought I found my tribe. It felt right, I was letting my light out, and then suddenly, it turned out it was the very wrong place, that I wasn’t wanted, that I had intruded. I joined a local art group, a paint & sip. It was lively, eclectic and it was so cool art and talk about art. But it turned out it was just friend group of one man, one man who yelled at me for talking one day.
When I found the group, I had been told it was open and inclusive. But it turned out it was by invite only, and I had invited myself. The man told me I was rude, took up too much space, that everyone agreed that I had to leave.. and oh, btw, I stank.
wat?
I heard later from others that this wasn’t true, or might be true, but not to the extent he said. Either way, he then blocked me from the group after telling me to never come back. Sometimes I see them advertising as a free group, welcome to all and know that’s not true.
Now every art event that shows up, I stop, and look and think. What if it is the same group? What if they tell me to leave? I loved the little cafe that it was held at, but I can’t go back unless they are not there because it is so small that they take up the whole space.
So I don’t.
And I’m trying to go out more, do things. Find people. Nothing feels right. There are good groups that I wouldn’t mind going back to after the year of work hell, then the year of mourning. Now I just have to step outside.
And I find that the hardest of all.
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