New Year's Resolutions

A common theme has run throughout my life: aloneness, sometimes accompanied by loneliness, sometimes by bitterness, sometimes by frustration. It seems I've always been alone. I'm the wallflower that you didn't know. On the outside I smile and flit here to there. Her lonely? No way! She's too bubbly. Only on the outside. Sometimes inside. Mostly alone.

I always wanted to be a writer until I discovered I have no story in me, except this one: A young woman, so desparately alone, is finally committed to a rest place, an asylum, a sanctuary, free from being pulled apart, to begin her real life--found in books. Isn't that sad?

Instead, I have words and put them to use in writing about other people, at least until I started blogging. Now all kinds of personal stuff boils out of me, mainly because I know not many (any?) people read my blog. I feel too sorry for myself. Where's my joy?

So, New Year's resolutions! Make any? I never do because it is all so futile.

1. Pray again. Be spiritually connected again. I have such childish views of God. My mother doesn't attend church because she is so hard of hearing. It would all be just buzz in a church, so she watches church TV every Sunday. One week a pastor fervently asked his audience to pray, really pray for one special thing, a very personal, special thing to prove that God answers prayers. My mother is a voracious reader and was gradually losing her eyesight to cataracts. Her doctor would not perform that surgery until her blood pressure went down. For two LONG years she struggled with medication, diet, rest, exercise, everything, but it remained too high for him. When she prayed for her surgery, that's when she had us call another doctor, who saw her, and promptly set the date for the first procedure, then the second. Now it is done and she sees again! No doubt, God answered her prayer or set things in motion for it to be answered!

So, I've been saving my special prayer until I knew exactly what would be special for me. Here it is: a new job. No more children. No more lesson plans (which I don't write anyway). No more discipline (a problem I utterly hate dealing with). Just a new job that pays the same meager amount I'm making now. That's my prayer--a new job, having nothing to do with schools.

2. Unclutter. Been working on it. Seems I get nowhere, but I'm so far from where I started that I know I have accomplished so much. So far yet to go.

3. Diet and exercise. The age-old problem of gaining weight and not exercising. When spring comes again, I can work in my yard, hauling and lifting, digging and carrying on in the yard. Great exercise! Diet by eating properly and proportionately!

4. Force myself to keep in contact with people. I am becoming a hermit.

5. That's a good start. That's enough.