It's Not Easy Being Green...But It's Acceptable.

I took a look around me the other day and a trend of mine caught my attention: GREEN. I was surrounded by green...stuff. Not mold or anything like that but *items* that I had either purchased or had been given to me. It wasn't a major epiphany but it still struck me as noteworthy. At least noteworthy enough to blog about it...

Now, it is true that green is one of my favorite colors and I do tend to gravitate towards a particular color (hello, orange. I almost bought an orange car, for god's sake) but this was more than that and was most decidedly unplanned. It started with my Patagonia down jacket that I had gotten in October while visiting friends in Maine. I thought it would be a good thing to go under my (then taupe colored) raincoat once I moved to Portland. It came in bright blue, hot pink and some other color that was clearly not memorable enough for me to recall what it was but the only acceptable color, in my eyes at least, was green. And so, I bought it. Without realizing it, I started gathering other green accessories into my life: My water bottle, a sheet set, a yoga mat that my roommate took from the lost & found at her job, a bag my friend brought me back from Mexico, a new raincoat that I got on sale (green was, once again, the only acceptable color). It wasn't a conscious effort, it just all kind of came together that way.

Well, I'm at a point in my life right now where I'm looking for meaning in almost anything that I can get my hands on. So I decided that, of course, all this greenness must mean *something*. And, as it turns out, the color green does have quite a few meanings:

Fresh. New. Inexperienced. Naive. Lush. Envious.

These are all adjectives I can apply to one portion of my life at any given time. Some are good while others are not so good. But they are all real and true and worthy of my attention. The negative ones I can work on changing and the positive ones I can work on incorporating into more aspects of my life. The good, the bad and the ugly all exist, but it's how we handle them that matters. I could focus on the negativity, beat myself up over it, force myself to change whatever it is I think needs changing. But the truth is, that won't help, it just makes it worse. Trust me, I've been here before. So I'm embracing everything about myself, because until I do that, my life will always be what I don't want it to be.

Mistakes and wrong turns lead you somewhere. It might not be exactly where you thought you'd be and occasionally, it's the exact opposite of where you want to be. But it's where you are. And there's something comforting in that.

So, as I work through all of this, I am keeping the words of Kermit the Frog in mind: "I am green, and it'll do fine. It's beautiful and I think it's what I want to be."

The Journey of 2987 Miles Begins With...

Song of the Day: The Boxer --Simon & Garfunkel

In the clearing stands a boxer 
And a fighter by his trade 
And he carries the reminders 
Of ev'ry glove that layed him down 
Or cut him till he cried out 
In his anger and his shame 
"I am leaving, I am leaving" 
But the fighter still remains 

My song of the day may seem strange as I am not a boxer, nor have I visited the whores on 7th Avenue. But I do feel like a fighter and the battle I'm up against these days feels like the toughest one yet.

I've had a lot of free time since I moved back to Portland. I haven't had much free time since I started working full time 2 years ago. Even the 3 months I had off between graduating from x-ray school and working 3 jobs weren't spent doing anything fun or particularly interesting. I thought the best use of my time back then would be to begin freaking out about finding a job so I could finally get rid of my debt and pay back my student loans. As soon as I started working 65 hours a week, I realized there wasn't much time to do anything...except work. I woke up in the morning, went to work, came home and went to sleep. But I was making good money and was grateful to have so many jobs when classmates of mine were struggling to find any work at all. I had almost no time to myself but I felt blessed all the same.

When things started to get difficult at my full-time job, I tried my best to take it all in stride. Sure, it wasn't an ideal situation, but what situation is? How many people love their jobs? So I took the extra work and the positions I wasn't qualified or trained for. I took the screaming, the blame, the abuse, the mood swings and the guilt trips because it would eventually all be worth it. Things would settle down and start going well. We would hire people to take over all the jobs I had acquired but wasn't hired for and that would be that. I waited for all the promises to come to fruition but none of that ever happened and things got progressively worse, both at my job and for me. I was exhausted, easily irritated and stressed out beyond recognition. My mom started asking me if I was okay a lot more than usual. It was starting to affect me physically. I was worried I would get fired but also secretly prayed for it. I said at least once a day "I can't wait to get out of here." But I needed money to get myself out. It was a catch-22 and everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, I had to convince myself that I could handle it.

Four months ago, after a terrible day at work, I hit my breaking point and walked out. I had never quit a job without notice and part of me felt guilty...but most of me felt awesome. It was liberating and exciting and wonderful. It felt right. Literal minutes after I made my decision, I received a text from my old roommate telling me my old room in Portland would be available in a month.

And that was that. The decision was made. My dream of moving back to Portland was finally coming true.

So now I'm back in Portland. Getting back here has been my ultimate goal for at least the past year, definitely longer than that if you count *wishing* the move was possible instead of *knowing* it was. I was looking forward to relaxing and having fun in the city I'm so happy to call home once again. But that plan went slightly differently than I had hoped and, well, I gotta say, it's been a bit of a shitshow...for lack of a better word.

It feels as though every emotion I've ever had over the past 2 years that I didn't have time to deal with not only surfaced, but roared as they made their presence known. Good and bad feelings were unleashed and, though I have plenty of time to handle them, I wasn't expecting all of them at once. Some of them I wasn't expecting at all. They seem to rise out of nowhere without warning. I feel out of control, like someone has reprogrammed me and all I'm doing is spinning my wheels to figure how I work again.

On top of relocating 3000 miles away from my family, trying to find a job and readjusting to a new routine, dealing with this feels, at the very least, amazingly overwhelming. I don't know where to begin. Everything feels like it is the most important issue. Over the course of 2 years, I've managed to completely neglect my self-worth and sacrifice my morals and beliefs. I listened to half truths and made decisions based on them. I let people make me feel worthless, cheap, stupid and replaceable. But I didn't realize any of this until I had the time and space to sit back and watch it all unfurl onto my life like a giant tidal wave. I am now dealing with the wreckage and trying to hold myself together as best I can.

This time off I've been given started out as a break, became a nightmare but it will end up being a gift. I'm grateful for the chance to get to work this out in a city I love, surrounded by people who care about me and know that I will be okay. There is only one way out: through. I'm excited, scared and bewildered as I take these first steps. I've been in a terrible, poisonous, self-loathing mindset for far too long and I know I only have good things in store. After all the anger and the shame, I'm not leaving. My fighter still remains...