Five years. Really? Seriously? It doesn't seem like it's really been that long since my last drink, last high, last blackout, but it has. What's funny is that there are so many other periods of my life that I look back on and think: if I had it to do all over, I think I may do this one little bit differently. Not me, not this time, not with this particular period. Not at all. Now, I look back and I think that I never might have imagined five years ago that I'd go to work for a psychiatric facility and have an ennui to pursue a professional medical degree, nor that I'd be employable and resilient and reliable and stable and worthy. I never could have imagined that in five short years I'd go from complaining about the shambles I'd created to complaining that there's never enough time to complete the updates to the webpages of the organizations on whose boards I serve. Nor could I have thought that I'd be trying to figure out how to juggle a solid forty hours at a business I love with extracurricular meetings and committees and service commitments, or membership in a Book Club and the reading and prep that goes along with being a part of that with picking up dry cleaning and developing something of a real, mature and hopeful personal life (which has recently unexpectedly blossomed to a situation of explosively magical proportions, I might add).
I also never thought that I'd find the ability to tell another human being that I could see the two of us doing exactly what we're doing right here and right now from the here and now well into the rest of the remainder of our world, spending our lives in the company of each other and building a life and a family and careers and hopes and dreams and more and more endless aspirations for any- and everything that may or may not be forthcoming. What's more, I never in a hundred million billion trillion years would've thought that my words and emotions and ideas would not only not fall on deaf ears, but find themselves well received and well regarded and well respected for the possibility that they offer.
Is this what it feels like to be an adult? To know that in just two years, I'll be faced with not a new job, but a new career... that I'll be experiencing a year in a major trauma center, getting the skills under my belt and learning to deal with crisis management and prepping my pen to fill out the application for a graduate program that actually may lead to be opening my own practice... that I might actually be with this same person with whom I've shared all my hopes and dreams and we may actually be planning an adoption or drawing floorplans for an as-yet-unimagined living space... that I might actually be even more of a success than I am right now?
I never thought I'd live to see the days where I'd actually look back on the months before when that other goal was realized and I set my eyes on one approaching in just under a month so that I can plan to set yet another for sometime well into the future. I'm amazed with myself today. I'm amazed with my higher power, the energy in charge of making this and everything else possible. I feel hopeful and alive and excited and completely and totally freaked out all at the same time.
Crazy and unexplainable, but I just may have found the perfect formula for health, wealth, happiness, and prosperity. Don't know for sure if I could be any happier than I am right now, and it doesn't matter because, for the first time in my life, I feel something else that's even stranger and less familiar: content.
Very cool.
