Wednesdays at Forty-Something: Who Is This Woman?

I don't recognize who I've become.  Transition is HARD.  It is so very hard.  I spent a the last four or five years of being in the Air Force focused on getting out, on retiring.  There was an endpoint.  There was a tangible milestone.

Now there isn't.  I've spent a good portion of the past 18 months, trying to find a new direction, a new focus.  I'm unsettled.  I'm scared.  I'm excited.  I'm anxious.  I'm sad.  I'm happy.  I have experienced every possible emotion and, I think, discovered some new ones.  I don't recognize this person.  I'm so very different from what I was while in the Air Force and I don't know what to do with this new personality.

The core is still the same--I'm still a loyal, generous, compassionate person; but it's the relationships that are new in my life--whether they're new to my life completely or experiencing a new facet--that are taking the most pummeling.  I feel like I'm about to lose two very important people in my life, all because I'm so uncertain in the skin I'm in.

I'm working on becoming more accustomed to this new self but it's so very difficult.  And I'm finding it extremely hard to get out of this fucking pity party that I've been in for the past six months.  I'm not a joy to be around.  I'm so stuck on the fact that my best friends don't live here, my blood family doesn't live here, my two loves don't live here; that I'm not appreciating all that I do have here.

Mary and Joseph!! I just don't know what to do with myself.  I sit in front of my gohonzon and chant to see my life better but I seem to be stuck.  The clarity just isn't coming.

I see friends getting married and I envy them their love.  I see friends succeeding in life and I wonder "How do I get there?"  I see families spending time with their parents and siblings and I rail at the things that make it so that I can't.  I'm missing seeing my baby niece grow up.  I never saw her brother or sister grow up either.  They're both grown.

I resent the things that keep friends and family from visiting me.  I can count on fewer than ten fingers how many different people have visited me (in the past decade) and I wonder "Why?"  (There's that pity-party again.)

I'm struggling to find things that I enjoy doing.  I got so accustomed to not doing too many things because they cost money and I've spent, literally, the past ten years paying off more than $40,000 in debt.  That debt is gone but it takes time to change the mindset to teaching myself to enjoy adventures and going to do more things again.

I'm trying.  So very hard.

Who am I?

I plan to find out.