Hello

OK I'm a huge slacker. I haven't written anything in so long I don't even know what I've missed blogging about. But I guess I have something to say today so here goes.

Today is September 11th.

8 years ago today I was wearing a pretty white dress and walking down a very pretty aisle towards what turned out to be a very bad decision. The dress was great, the day was fun and fabulous. I just didn't have the guy part worked out too well.

I can't help but think of my wedding day as I am getting ready for work this morning. I was doing my hair and remembering how me and my girls went to all get our hair done together. I remember having 10 billion beautiful pearls placed strategically in my hair, not realizing that later that night they would all have to come out and it isn't exactly sexy, nor does it set the right mood for a wedding night to pluck bobby pins and pearls from your head. I remember Tammy sitting in her car working on her toast, the one that made me cry. I'm pretty sure the only time I cried that day was after Tammy's toast. It was the most personal beautiful expression of our friendship up to that point in our life and I loved every line of it. I wish Eric had been smart enough to listen to it, it may have turned his stony heart into something human. But alas it was not to be. He probably still has his heart of stone. Or was it an alien heart? Ah, I digress. I was remembering the great day. We sure had a lot of fun that day, didn't we?

Of course then I can't help but think of two years after my wedding day. I was four months separated and working towards divorce already. My mom was taking me to Vegas to get my mind off the fact that it should have been my anniversary. She wanted to replace some of the hurt with some great memories of us going to Vegas to see "O". That didn't work because of the people that thought they should fly planes into the World Trade Center in order to get their message across. Then of course because I wasn't working, I sat home and watched nothing but WTC coverage and became so emotionally involved in the tragedy that I still have a hard time watching footage from that day.

So with all that going on today you would think that I didn't have a very good day. But surprisingly I had a pretty decent day. I presented my second speech in Toastmasters and got voted as best speech of the day. I decided to not write out my speech and give an impromptu, off the cuff, from the heart speech and talked about 9-11 and what it meant to me. The duality of the day for me is something that I think about a lot this time of year. The beginning of my marriage and then the end of my marriage and the end of a lot of people's lives. For some reason I think there is a lesson there. There is something there that I need to reflect on and think about. So today I talked about it and told everyone the experiences I had. And it made me feel good to share it.

It also made me realize that my life has taken a very weird and crazy journey in the last eight years. There are few days when you remember exactly what you were doing but 9-11 is one of those days for me when I remember exactly what I was doing the same day two years apart. I think back to the person I was at each of those years and it makes me wonder how I am still here today. That might sound weird, but I know NOW all the things that I was willing to give up that made me who I am in order to marry Eric. Things that define who I am, things that make me happy. I think about how hard I tried to change the basic nature of who I was in order to make our marriage work and how ridiculous it sounds to me now that I would do that. I think about who I was two years later and how I feel like he took those great things that made me Tina and tried to squish them out. I feel like he tried to strip me of all the things that I loved. Then of course I think about how even though I almost let those things go, how I almost gave up those things that were and are so important to me, I knew enough then to know it wasn't right. I knew that I didn't want to live my life without those parts of me. I knew that if I truly wanted to be happy with my life I had to change it in the most difficult of ways.

I know now that I am a strong woman. I know that I can deal with life's challenges and I can overcome them. I know now that I am who I am and that the basic part of me will not change and I am so happy that I figured that out. I know that if my life is not going the way I want it to, I have the power to change it, and I have. More than once.

Today is a day that I tend to reflect on my life, as you can see. What I can see is that I am finally "there". Wherever "there" is, I made it.