Hard Questions

Hard Questions


As I’m shopping for eyeglasses online to get ready to head downtown sometime in the next few days to finally get my eyes checked after years of them getting worse and worse, I’m rewatching The Minimalists on Netflix for probably the third time. I don’t know why, but the first guy is talking about getting rid of his stuff and jettisoning over 90% of his stuff, and then he starts asking himself the deeper questions. I pause. The deeper questions are what I came up against. They are what’s stopping me. 

You know, I’m about 80-90% finished with going through my stuff and the household stuff, leaving my husband’s stuff for whenever he wants to go through it if he ever wants to go through it. Just because it’s my obsession doesn’t mean it has to be his obsession as well! But I stopped, and I didn’t know what was stopping me until now. I think it’s the bigger questions: the questions I’m afraid to ask myself. What now? What does my life truly mean without possessions to fall back on? Who am I without chasing sales? Am I a completely different person to value quality over quantity??? Does that make me rich, to have a few good things instead of a lot of cheap things??? I don’t think we are spending more money than we did before I lost my job, but I haven’t been keeping track. I’ve been living off gift cards we keep finding from Christmases past, my credit card that I will pay off once I get a job again, and the money I have left over in my checking account while most of the bills are coming out of my husband’s paycheck. I’ve made a couple splurges (a new pair of dress shoes for work, my glasses will be a splurge, medical bills on the credit card, a few lights for the house that are $10 each that fit on our small end tables, are portable and easily rechargeable, and a desk and chair for me instead of me sitting at the kitchen table or my bed). Wow, now that I write it out, that’s a lot of splurges, but are purposeful for the house. They may take up space, but they have a purpose, they are high quality, and they are worth the time, money, and energy.

We have been saving money by buying food and cooking instead of going out to eat. We don’t go to coffee shops nearly as much, preferring to bring drinks with us to save money and make our coffee at home. I’m even considering dropping some memberships that we don’t use often enough to justify the expense. $10-20 a month doesn’t seem like a lot, but when it could be used to save towards something else, especially when there are two or three or more, we could do it. I guess in a way I am asking myself what is worth it and what is not worth it. It’s easier than asking the questions about myself of who am I and what am I doing with my life.

I also have tough decisions with relationships in my life. I have one friendship in particular that has been going on for years. We both started out with crappy lives and negative outlooks, but I have worked particularly hard to gain a positive outlook on life. I dread every time this friend messages me. I have been through a lot. I feel like most of my life has been centered on improvement, and I am finally starting to notice improvement. Others continue to treat me the same way, and I am tired of it. This one friendship in particular I want to let go because I’ve warned them in the past that their negativity just keeps dragging me down, and they’ve had one or two conversations trying to be positive, but it’s back to being negative again. Do I keep reminding them every conversation, or how much grace do I give this person before I let this friendship end? I can’t let them keep dragging me down.

Anyway, those are some of the tough questions I have been asking myself and pondering. What difficult conversations have you been pondering lately?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Drunk Uncle Boundaries

Did That Seriously Come Out of Their Mouth? We all have that friend or family member who we wince when cornered by. They lock eyes, and it seems the conversation never ends. Worse, it seems like they have opposite views as you do, but they don’t care. They just nod their heads until you nod your head and pretend like you’re enjoying the conversation. Then they take that as their cue to continue for half an hour more. If someone tries to save you, there’s a 50/50 chance they will be pulled into the conversation too, depending on how skillful they are it could lean more heavily on the side of damage. I get you. There are fortunately many Facebook reels about this very topic. Just keep researching “narcissist” and eventually Facebook will point you to these very people. Some of them don’t possess empathy. Some of them have no idea what another person could feel or think besides themselves. They are stuck in their own corner of the world. I am no expert in this, but I took classes on bound...
Read more

Autism in My Own Words Part 1

Autism in My Own Words Part 1   I don’t know how we do it. Or how “normal people” do it… they gather, have parties, talk, drink, eat, “mingle,” etc. I find myself talked at while I find a person’s eyebrows or lips moving and try to lipread to help decipher through the noise what they are trying to say. I thought I was the only one contorting my face in a carefully practiced dance of lips, cheeks, and especially eyebrows to make level expert look what everyone else looked like what level easy looked like. I’ve been doing it my whole life, and I’ve been doing it so long that I’ve forgotten I’ve even been doing it. Until I got diagnosed with autism and found others like me. And my mask slipped. Suddenly I was “being autistic” and “not who I was before.” Everything was harder, and my eyebrows took more energy to move, my eyebrows could hardly stay awake, and so many more things took so much more energy. I have hardly been to a social gathering since then. But today I was talking ...
Read more

From A Candle

Let It All Burn To The Ground No, don’t let it all burn to the ground. Then you would be left with nothing but grief and nothing to start from. Change comes slowly and from using what you already have. I had a brilliant idea as I was falling asleep for a blog post, but of course I didn’t write it down or type it up, so poof it went! I needed some time by myself (which isn’t that difficult since I’m alone when my husband goes to work in the mornings as I’m searching for a job). I made it my self-care today to stare into a candle for five minutes and put on some music, hoping that would rejuvenate me. I was also hoping it would inspire me to write a post. I’ve been holding off on what I’ve been learning in Partial until after the New Year, making way this past week for change and hope and New Year stuff, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I felt like Christmas just went awry in my attempts at changing others. And I shouldn’t have been seeking to change others in the first place. So I’m sittin...
Read more