Ever feel like life is a swirling, raging, danger-filled tornado, launching itself ever in your direction no matter how you run and dodge to get away?  I’m having one of those….years.  From the last week of 2011 up to today, my life seems to have remained in turmoil.  There have, indeed, been good days but those have been fleeting and few.  I feel that I can’t seem to plant my feet on any kind of solid ground as the dirt rumbles and shifts beneath my poorly-balanced posture.

On a positive note, my children are well and there have been times in our drama-laden lives that each of them were in jeopardy.  I am often able to diminish the seemingly overwhelming circumstances of my current haphazard existence by reminding myself that the most valued and treasured blessings in my life are all healthy and happy right now.  As easy as it is to say “it could always be worse”, however, I am human and it is a challenge to overcome the weight that crushes the air from your lungs when it seems to never release for long enough to take a clean breath.  I feel like I have been verklempt and overwhelmed for the last three months, at least.

I turn to close friends but, when I say close, I mean emotionally.  Several of my most trusted confidants are actually far, far away in the respect of physical distance.  I love them no less than if they lived across the street (although, what I wouldn’t do to be able to sit and share a glass of wine while commiserating with them).  Other close friends, to whom I live closer, have lives, families, circumstances of their own to which they must tend.  Again, they are no less friends but sometimes life makes each of us unavailable in dark times due to responsibility.

I also feel like people must get incredibly tired of my drama.  Truly, I would love to live a life with much less drama.  Although I like a good play, movie or musical as much as the next diva, I am tired of employing so many soap-operatic plot lines in my own life.  My life is one of those stories that, no matter the depth of imagination, no one would just make up.  I think a screenplay writer would look at the events of my story and say “No one will ever believe that all of these things revolve around the life of one person.  No one has that much bad luck.”  And yet…luck?  No, I don’t think so.  I just never seem to learn the lesson that is being presented.  You’ve heard the saying?  If you don’t learn the lesson, it will continue to be presented, with increasing devastation, until you do?  Or how about “Why do you always take the hard road?”  “Why do you assume I see two roads?”  Well, for goodness sake…I’m all ears!  Devastation be damned!

So, where to begin again?  I recently said that I thought my new beginning was here.  I actually said to some friends that I thought I could smell the spring-fresh breeze of positive changes, gently blowing the winter-dried leaves from my life.  I think that was only, perhaps, two weeks ago and yet, little did I know, another lightning bolt of stark reality was already growing steadily in power, gaining kilowatts of energy with the intention of striking boldly and igniting another series of uncontrollable events that would bring me to my knees yet again.  I want a fresh start but does one ever really get that?  Is it possible to stand, take a deep breath, put one foot in front of the other and believe, truly believe, that an opportunity for walking, free of obstacles and impossible threats, does actually exist?

This new mountain to climb feels staggeringly overwhelming at the moment.  One way or another, I will overcome the dread, fear and guilt (warranted or not) that has accompanied this struggle in my life.  I sit here today attempting to plan a revolution upon the successful completion of this stifling journey.  I am strategizing a civil war of sorts that I intend to wage against the melodrama that has become my life.  A vicissitude is in order, and well overdue for me, so I resolve to learn a way to accomplish the turnaround.  This would certainly be less complicated (and, truthfully, would have occurred prior to now) if I had any idea where to start the spin but not trying is not an option.

Blow winds blow…I’m adding steel beams to my foundation and planning fire-retardant exteriors.  Even with the wolf at my door, there is no chance you will blow me down.  And that’s that.