Cleaning my office I found a list of commandments that I created for myself while reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. I’m posting them here because I find a lot of inspiration from others and maybe you do too.
It’s not easy being me.
Some days I don’t want to be me.
Sometimes the burden of proof is too heavy. Too hard. Too exhausting.
You get tired of explaining that your intentions are pure.
That you’re not angry.
Not a bitch.
That you’re happy. And loving. And caring. But you can have all the actions to support those things and people will still see the versions of you that they want to see.
I did it!!!!
Last Thursday I achieved one of the things that a large number of Americans want to achieve: I purchased my first home. It’s been a very interesting process. I’ve had what seems like millions of conversations with various home owners and none of those conversations prepared me for this journey. It has been surreal.
Today was moving day. I can’t even count the amount of times that I have moved over the years but moving into your forever home has a vastly different feel than the feelings of moving into a new apartment. I woke up at five am and begin flitting through the house excitedly while I waited for my movers to arrive.
Moving day taught me a few things:
No matter how much you prepare you will forget something.
– Usually one of the most important things on your list. In my case it was the power drill which I really needed to drill the legs onto my new couches and toilet bowl cleanser.
There are some amazing people in this world.
– The College Hunks who moved my junk actually took the time to help my son assemble our mailbox before rushing off until their next appointment. My electrician helped DJ assemble the couches after discovering that we didn’t have a drill. He moved the power cord for the stove so that he could push the stove back making it flush with the wall. He also made the stove level after discovering that the Sear’s delivery men basically dropped the items off, did the bare minimum, and high tailed it out of here.
Some people are only looking to do the bare minimum.
– I had two deliveries from Sears today, a mattress for the master bedroom, and a refrigerator and stove. Both times the delivery guys came in, placed my items down as quickly as possible, and jetted out after getting quick signatures. What they don’t know is I had planned to tip all of them. They didn’t get the gratuity because they didn’t deserve it but also because I barely had time to ask questions before they ran away. Maybe they had busy schedules. Maybe they wanted to get home to their families. Either way a few extra minutes would’ve equaled a few extra dollars in their pockets.
Those dollars ended up with the most deserving person though: My electrician. I forgot to mention that he straightened my doorknob (unscrewed the knob and made it level) because it was slightly off-center and “Getting on my last nerve. You may not notice it but I do.” There are definitely angels on this earth.
FLEAS: I have found at least six fleas in this house. I know they didn’t come from the new furniture. We noticed a few before the deliveries started arriving and kind of brushed it off but after everything was situated and we sat down to eat we noticed a few more. We don’t have carpets, or animals, and we didn’t have any at the other house. I also didn’t notice them during any of my walk throughs, during the inspection, or any of the other times that I have been to this house. I have no idea where they came from but I do know that I can’t call the office and request pest control. I am officially maintenance, security, pest control, the manager, and all other duties that arise.
*CHALLENGE ACCEPTED*
Lastly I was reminded that if you don’t freak out at the first sign of trouble you can think clearly and the Universe will provide for you as it always does. I needed to be at both houses today on three different occasions and between pushing the car to the speed limit, awesome repair and installation people, and great timing I managed to meet every delivery person, be here long enough for every installation, and manage the movers at both houses. Most of these things were happening at two places simultaneously.
*Cues I am a God*
Stay tuned, I’m tired and I feel like I’m rambling but I plan to keep you guys updated on this home ownership journey.
Special Thanks to College Hunks Hauling Junk, Wayne the electrician, and Verizon for the superb patience and way above and beyond service. And to Kelly Parks of Keller Realty for the gift card that helped me purchase my stove and refrigerator.
Also to my neighbor slash homey/lover/friend Mo for coming through with the flea bombs. Something tells me where there are six there are more.
My plant Alice. I named her after my great grandmother. Keep your ancestors close. They help ground you.
College Hunks do more than just haul junk.
How many people does it take to put together a mailbox? At least five.
Wayne the electrician.
New fridge and stove from Sears Outlet.
DJ would you like to use a drill?
Delivery equals bringing items to your home and plopping them down as quickly as possible. -Note to self ask what that delivery fee covers.
Wayne The Great
These Hunks were awesome!
DJ unloading the car.
Live Out Loud
I don’t wear a watch because I march to the beat of my own drum.
That’s not to say I don’t respect other people’s time.
I do.
But in my mind:
There are no clocks.
There is no time.
There are no limits except the ones you’re imposing upon your self.
Stop.
Love.
Live.
Be free.
You don’t have to have it all figured out today or next week.
You have your whole life ahead of you.
So stop with all the planning
The “by 25 I’m going to be here”
“By 29 I would have accomplished all of this”
“By 35 I’m going to be that.”
Stop
Stop
Stop doing that
And start doing it
Start living,
start giving,
Stop and smell the roses.
Run a foot race down the street in your bare feet.
Plant a tree.
Kiss some chick you do not know.
Fuck any and everybody you want to fuck.
-use protection-
Just do it.
Do the whole world a favor;
Stop planning it out and start living out loud.
Things I wish 25 year old me had known.
On the night that your fiancée waltzes in to your bedroom, sits down across from you, and says the dreaded four words “We need to talk.” then after much terrified prodding and the most horrible pregnant pause of your entire life follows that statement up with “I’m not ready to be married.” You will think that you’re going to die. In fact you will carefully consider that option. After all the beer bottle that you’re now drowning your sorrows in could easily be broken and you could use one of the shards to slit your wrists. But this is not really a viable option. You’re an adult woman and this is not your first rodeo. You are after all once divorced and you know that this too shall pass. That the sun will in fact come out tomorrow and unfortunately (or at least it seems) this is not where your story ends.
You won’t sleep well. This could be from the fact that you went to bed at seven pm or it could be from the fact that you’ve just lost a piece of you. It makes sense that when such a huge part of your life, something you’ve looked forward to, and worked so hard for falls apart without much advance notice, that you will be restless. This is when you must make the decision to be ok.
So you get up out of bed at the butt crack of dawn and make the brilliant decision to go for a walk. It’s not very surprising that you walk the three miles to downtown Tampa in a fugue state. You barely even acknowledged the six homeless men who yelled out to you when you made your way past Curtis Hixon Park. Even right outside of your neighborhood when you’d made it to Kennedy and that police officer had pulled you over (is that the term for when you’re walking?) and asked where you were headed after demanding your identification; even that was surreal. Hell you weren’t even scared though you should have been; Mike Brown isn’t even cold… for that matter neither is Yvette Smith. But you weren’t, you just handed him the ID and waited patiently as he ran your name, came back, passed you the card, and urged you to be safe.
Maybe you knew that you were headed to the place where you thought you had solidified your future. You weren’t surprised when you ended up there. Was it fate that made the lights the same colors that they were when the proposal happened. You know they’ve since changed. That one night you went to the festival they were yellow and red. But the worst night of your life they were the exact same color as they were on the best night of your life. Pink and blue. Like the colors that parents choose to bring their newborn babies home in. Like the colors of Easter eggs. Like the color of your favorite sky.
And was it fate that made that damn Rihanna song come on. As you were sitting there trying to figure out if this thing that you had declared to be art on the best day of your life was actually art on the worst day of your life. As the lights changed from pink to blue and the tears flowed and Rihanna sang about how she wanted him to stay then Taylor Swift burst in saying how she couldn’t make him stay and how players were gonna play play play, was that part fate? I don’t think you ever even figured out if it were art. When you paused the song and looked it up Google defined art as“the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance”. Wasn’t this creative? This massive square brick structure with the beautiful lights that changed color from time to time. This thing that housed art. Was it in fact art? Aren’t the lights so pretty though? Even if it’s not art?
I don’t think you figured it out, whether it was art or not because you couldn’t get rid of the feeling that your heart had been simultaneously snatched out of your chest and shoved down your throat at the same time. You thought you had a partnership… That you were working towards creating/ building a life together and now you realized that you’re not. Well, you didn’t realize it as much as you had been informed of it.
Why did you come here? To bring back the memories of how shocked and happy you were when she pulled you to the front of that crowd of dancing people because your song was playing. You were so into trying to mimic the dancers moves and singing how you wanted to dance with somebody who loved you that you missed your entire family sitting all around you. Your dad was actually sitting at a cafe table right next to you when she turned you around and got down on one knee. You didn’t see him there though because you were having fun and you were in love and she, the woman of your dreams was asking you to marry her. And everything was beautiful. After you said yes and danced some more with your friends and family and you’d cried happy tears in this same spot in front of this brilliant piece of art. She’d asked if you wanted to go inside and you’d replied “No.” “Don’t you want to see the art?” she’d asked looking down at that huge diamond that she’d just placed on your hand and you’d turned her around so that she could see the lights on the building and asked “Isn’t this art? Aren’t we art?”
Now you remember why you came. When she was telling you how now just wasn’t the right time, and saying how it wasn’t you it was her, and how her job was going to require her to travel more, and her brother needed her, and how maybe one day the timing would be right, you had made the decision to come here to kiss forever goodbye in the same fashion that you had kissed it hello.
So, On the night your fiancée waltzes in to your bedroom, sits down across from you, and says the dreaded four words “We need to talk.” then after much terrified prodding and the most horrible pregnant pause of your entire life follows that statement up with “I’m not ready to be married.” When the news you are hearing is flowing over you like the suffocating heat of a hot August afternoon there are two things you can do. One, you can totally come undone. You can take out every single pin that you have stuck in you, peel off every piece of tape that you’ve stuck to you, remove every staple, and dissolve every ounce of glue that you have ever used to hold your being together and you can lose it. This is a totally acceptable option. Or Two: you can go to the place where you thought forever was cemented in stone and you can kiss forever goodbye and you could even cry but you could make a vow to not let this destroy you. Either you fall apart, or you stand up, you insert steel into your spinal cord, look over at that big beautiful piece of art and you say “What’s next cause I’m ready?”
I wanted you to know your worth
You are not a mistake you are too many exquisite details to be a mistake
It is pretty much a guarantee that as we age those who were caregivers will trade places with those who were formerly in their care. The child becomes the “parent” is a phrase that I’ve heard frequently throughout my nursing career. I’ve actually uttered it on more than one occasion while trying to help someone cope with the change of roles between they and their parents. Of course I knew that my day would eventually come but no matter how much you think about a thing you’re never fully ready when it happens.
My grandmother means more to me than most people in life. She has been so much to me throughout my life. My confidante, parent, role model, best friend, doctor, masseuse and the list goes on. The one person who I can tell anything without worrying about feeling any kind of judgement. My mother had me at an early age so in a sense I grow up alongside her calling both my grandmother and my mother; mom.
So the text that I received a few weeks ago stating that mommy was having health issues caused my heart to stutter. Flashed me back to a memory of my cousins and I arguing over who loved her more. “If she died I would throw myself in the casket with her.” I vowed causing my cousins to yell at me for ever suggesting that she would ever die. In our young minds she would be around and healthy forever.
She’s so strong and up into a couple of weeks ago she was running around CT better than people twenty years her junior. Taking trains and taxis to the casino whenever the whim suited her. Traveling from state to state as if there were no barriers. Never needing any assistive device or any assistance from anyone. Now that has changed and I had been notified via text. Via text…
Even after I talked to my grandmother and she assured me that she was ok. “They’re always exaggerating. You ain’t got to worry about me baby.” Was how she phrased it laughing and downplaying the situation as my aunt continued to text message me about walkers and colonoscopies. The nurse in me needed to assess the situation with my own eyes.
Two flights later I was in her home wearing both the eyes of her daughter and the eyes of her nurse and while it was oh so easy to tell other people’s parents to get rid of their cat or their car, there are not many things more daunting than trying to decide how to tell your own mom that she needs to get rid of her throw rugs. That the table that she keeps lifting her walker over is unsafe as is the cellphone cord that she has stretched across the walkway to her bathroom. Or that yes, you do think that she needs one of those I’ve fallen and I can’t get up things.
I spent an entire twenty-four hours cringing every time she went to the restroom trying to find a way to broach the subject before I mentioned the placement of the table. Of course she lifted up the walker to display for me how light it was. It was not a problem and she would be “OK Baby.”
I don’t like conflict so when she went to the bathroom to get dressed for church I moved the table, plugged her cellphone charger up behind her bed and placed it on her nightstand, then I spent twenty minutes on Amazon ordering all of the things I had discovered she was low on during my assessment; toilet paper, paper towels, ivory spring bar soap, and her beloved beef ravioli.
I thanked God when she came out of the bathroom and laughed “I was going to ask you to put that table over there.” she said before sitting on the bed to finish getting dressed for church. I hope she meant to ask me to replenish her supply of Chef Boy A Dee as well. Either way I embrace the challenge of encouraging her to enjoy her autonomy while moving things out of her way for her own good.
I don’t however, embrace the fact that she may need a hip replacement for pain. I don’t believe that this is something that she has recently been struggling with. Lastly, I don’t know how I’m supposed to live in FL while she’s in CT where I can’t consistently see her with my own eyes.
Formal Notice
I’m willing to move my ribs to the side for you.
Pluck open my back and give you pieces of my spine so that you can stand up straighter.
Invite you to have the pick of the draw when choosing my shoulders.
Choose wisely.
I want you to be properly prepared as you carry the weight of the world. You’ve been doing it alone for so long and two heads are better than one.
Three shoulders are better than two.
I would give you my heart but I need it. Couldn’t give you pieces of me so unequivocally without it. But I’ll give you a kidney,
sliver of my liver,
part of my lungs,
I would give you my tongue if only I knew you would use it to just speak up.
Why don’t you ever just speak up?
Why don’t I just speak up?
There’s an old saying advising people to do unto others as you’d have them do to you.
But what if you’ve given others your Milky Way and half of your stars out of the goodness of your heart and they can barely part with a kind word?
What then?
What do I do when I’ve shown you that I’m willing to give you more than half of all of me and I realize that you can’t be bothered to do the same?
What then?
What if I changed.
Gave to the world an exact replica of whatever it is that the world has given to me?
Dear World,
I taught you how to treat me. Accepted your bullshit even though I was allergic to it. Even though I knew it for exactly what it was.
But things have got to change. I can not continue to dry out my oceans to fill your river beds when you wouldn’t offer me a cold drink if it required too much work. Consider this my formal notice that the old ways are done.
And when you start to notice don’t be surprised.
Remember,
you already done been told.
Books over BeerPong. I’m the girl sitting in a corner at a party reading her book. Occasionally lowering it to respond to some inane question or to throw my two cents in to some random topic that I may or may not care about. Or to scope the scene. One must always be aware of their surroundings. Particularly if there is beer involved.
Should I be engaging with the people surrounding me? Many would say yes, me… I don’t really know. If my only reason for engaging is because others expect it or demand it of me then what’s the purpose. In that instance my participation isn’t genuine.
The older I get the more I want to be authentically me. The more I want to be around people who accept and understand the Authentic me.
I will no longer feel bad about being who I am. I will no longer surround myself with those who make me feel bad for being authentically me.
Some protests are silent. 
Eight years ago I met the love of my life. We became really good friends because in my head I was already with the love of my life. Throughout the years Ashley and I would remain friends going on occasional dates to catch up in between whoever was our most recent or current love of our life. Last July she called me and wanted to know if I would date her exclusively. I was excited but I didn’t think it would pan out to be much more than a few dates where we would catch up, enjoy each other’s time, and decide that now wasn’t OUR time; again. We would remain great friends and I would complain to my two best friends how I couldn’t find true love because no one would ever compare to Ashley. She was the ruler that everyone needed to measure up to. Honest to a fault, funny, sexy, and so positive. She made me better.
So much for great expectations and all that jazz. In her head this was our time and I would be her wife. I found out that we were in a relationship in my sleep as she told some guy that I was her partner. Excitement of what this time was for us began to set in. I told to myself OK it’s finally happening, I’m in a relationship with Ashley and life is grand. We move in together, we begin to build a life, and I am as happy as a bee on it’s favorite flower. After a while we begin to discuss marriage and I know that a proposal is coming soon. In fact being the control freak that I am, I have decided that the proposal is going to happen when we go to Italy for vacation.
My best friend and I begin to concoct a plan where I’m going to look perfect the entire time; my nails are going to be perfect, my outfits are going to be perfect, and I will never be without lipgloss. (A girl must always be prepared for the marriage proposal by the true love of her life.) I’m planning with my best friend how to be properly prepared for my proposal while Ashley is planning with my best friend how to throw me the perfect surprise proposal/engagement party.
So much for plans and all that jazz. My hair was perfect; before we spent a day at the beach and any natural haired woman who gets her hair straightened will tell you that the day at the beach is the end of straight hair. My nails were ok but they were far from perfect but this was fine by me really, because all that I had planned for Sunday was Brunch with some of the people from her networking group. So after the beach in go the two strand twists. A twist out is perfect for brunch… I should’ve caught on when she kept asking me what I was doing to my hair, what I was wearing, etc, etc… but I didn’t. As a matter of fact I didn’t even catch on when the people started dancing to OUR songs in front of our table. I totally believed her when she said that they did this often.
I’m glad that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t in control and properly prepared, 
that my hair wasn’t perfect, and that I totally would’ve worn a different outfit had I been aware. And I’m glad that it happened on a Sunday in August amongst all of my sneaky friends.
Photo Credit: Christy Marie Photography
Video Credit: Rokosz Studios
AuthenticallyAdrien 