I am on a lonely road and I am traveling...

When life is in chaos the mind is often so foggy that seeing a way out of a thick pea soup-like existence is near to impossible. It's been over a year since I left my marriage. When your life is taken up with the care of a terminally ill parent, the emphasis is taken off the reality of everything else. I was so numb for so long that my dysfunctional life seemed normal. I was the outcast, the crazy one, or so I thought. How could it be normal to live in your head, to fantasize about far away places, the romance, the passion, the life I'd yet to lead.

All those nights spent in my room, alone in bed, staring at the ceiling fan resulted in nothing. I'd like to say I had some sort of epiphany during that time but truth is, even a lightening bolt of an epiphany couldn't find its way through the layers of denial and guilt. I lived in my head for a long time. It was safe there. When asked, "How's life?" it was easy to respond. I was finishing a thesis, my mother was dying - "I'm stressed - how do you think I am?"Good answer containing only half the truth.

It's easy to hide behind chaos but what happens with the layers are stripped away? The mother is dead, the thesis is finished. Nowhere left to hide. It's a scary moment when you realize your life is based on a lie. I lied to myself that my rock musician husband didn't have a drinking problem. I lied to myself that I could ever be happy with this person who never really got me. He lacked passion for the things that mattered to me. He hates New York and Sinatra. Take away the drinking problem and you'd still have a guy who hates New York and Sinatra. So I smiled a lot in public, cried in private and longed for the passionate life. I longed to be real again. I longed to be myself, if I could remember who I was.

It's said there are defining moments in everyone's life. Mine was last Thanksgiving when I floated out of my head and saw the scene as someone else's life. This couldn't be my life. My family had no idea who I was anymore. I was a mere shadow of the old me. A tiny flicker instead of a firestorm. I left that day and never looked back.

I guess you could say I've been on a journey. How cliche, but true. I've had several realizations about life. The first, we all want love, romance and passion so we try and create it with the wrong people. Big mistake.

"How often this same thing has happened to me that now has happened to me again! I am submerged in the deepest suffering of despondency, so tied up in mental knots that I cannot get free, and since it is all connected with my personal life I suffer indescribably. And then after a short time, like an abscess it comes to a head and breaks—and inside is the loveliest and richest creativity—and the very thing I must use at the moment." - Kierkegaard