Tonight is New Year's Eve. Melissa and I will all but certainly follow our usual New Year's tradition and watch "When Harry Met Sally" once again. It's very nice to have our own life with its own traditions instead of following those dictated by others. There are so many things I am free to do right at long last but this is one with which I have managed to follow through. We don't get tired of this movie yet we enjoy it more some years than others. One of the keys is to avoid watching it during any time of the year and the other is a main benefit of watching a movie so many times. We can chat about it while it's playing and neither of us gets annoyed or misses anything. Thus, I look forward to our evening.
All in all, it hasn't been the best of years. Our finances remain in the hopeless category yet I know one or two good breaks are scheduled to come our way. Melissa is on a career track at work and has been for some time. Now, she has but two rungs remaining on the ladder of goals she set for herself. Each one will take a year or more and I'm leaning toward the more but I expect her to get her own store. I don't know when it might happen, which store it might be or even which company she might be working for by that time but I have faith in her. She works had with persistance and she can take a metaphorical punch better than anyone I know.
For my side of things, I have been writing. Most of my projects are mostly finished but I have come to accept mostly finished as a good state of being. As far as I'm concerned, no project will be truly finished until my signature is on a publishing contract, galleys have been corrected and I find out how to make public appearances even with my symptoms. It won't bear the slightest resemblance to easy but, it it did, I wouldn't need to be involved. I don't do the easy stuff. To put it more practically, I am not letting myself get caught up in steps that are well down the road because I don't understand them yet. The great terrifying unknowns are losing their ability to paralyze me at least where writing is concerned.
Another old habit of mine involves declaring defeat because I haven't passed the great test yet. Great and terrifying tests stand ahead of me yet I have to remember to give them my best when they arrive instead of fretting about them while today's lesser tests get no attention. The best example of how I've improved in practical matters is that I have paid enough attention to the power, phone and water bills to not have to stress over how to get them turned back on. It isn't as easy as it should be for me to declare this to be a form of victory. You know who's voice delivers an assessment of everything I've done measured against perfection and I fall short every tiime.
It took a long time for me to begin the process of letting go the higher standards I held for me. Trying to hold myself to the highest possible standards led to very little but failure and failure was unacceptable. In some ways, life was easier when I had an "eject and die" button to press. When I failed to meet those higher standards and then dropped below what I believed the theoretical "crumb bum" would achieve, I could decide to stop wasting oxygen and end it all. Of course, I failed at that and the shame made me do what I should have done in the first place. I learned to cope with failure first and I've since found a sense in achievement in coping with what I found below my standards.
Let's face it: the obstacles in my way are not the sort that everyone handles. You might be surprised at how well most people in the disabled community handle life's difficulties. That's why I don't try to find standards to use in making comparisons. If you're hurting, I believe you and believe that your achievements are as special as the obstacles can be difficult. A lot of people out there seem to have it easy until it all falls apart one day. They might not have had obstacles to overcome so that they learned the right skills in coping. Try to avoid looking down on the high and mighty when they fall because being high and mighty is poor training for a fall.
Over the past year, I have learned to fall and fall then fall some more. Things got bad but I always got back up with Melissa's help. Therefore, the trials ahead for 2016 scare the hell out of me but I believe we will survive them. We might even come out ahead somehow. I'm not sure it's possible but this is the domain of faith and hope. When we got a car totaled, we replaced it with a better one where we sit more comfortably and everything works despite the fact that it wasn't new. The car payment and increased insurance have been tough but we scrape by.
Tonight, I plan to spend a moment being proud of scraping by somehow. It could all come crashing down on us tomorrow but tonight marks another year of making too few resources stretch to cover too many needs. The numbers didn't balance out in every category but they did in enough to get by. The agony was too much for me some of the time but we kept it bearable most of the time. I wake each day differently from my distant past. Instead of planning how to end it all that day, I plan to find the best way to putter on. That's where we find our pride in this household. Today was another day when we didn't give and held tightly to our vows.
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