but deep down, a reset button is not the answer

The feeling that you have when you wish powerfully for a do-over? It's draining. Or perhaps, not so much a true do-over, but rather a second try. Or the ability to see an alternate course. The strength to say, TURN. Change. Try. Think differently. I have been making the same complaints and voicing the same concerns for a decade but the STOP. Now, go. moment has just not really truly happened.

When will it happen? When I sell my house I never really felt at home in (and for a huge loss, of course; the joys of the market)? When I decorate and paint my 'new' house? Will I feel at home there? Will I feel like I've found my place there?

Because in truth, that's all I really want. My place. My place in my home, my life, my community, with my friends. Room for my joys and interests, room to give of myself and be a part of things, room to laugh and feel at home.

Ten years lonely, ten years sad. For what?

But how to I turn my course - that's the problem. I can express, I hate it here, with more volume and energy than I knew I possessed. But that doesn't move me an inch in a direction of any kind. It just digs me deeper.

And in truth, I do mostly know that this is not it. Ten years of this is not it.

And now, I really don't care about taking a loss on the house. I don't care.  I want out of this place, out of this reality not of my choosing, out of feeling like a square peg surrounded by people who don't get me and don't want to get me. A place where I cannot be myself in any capacity. A place where I am so very, very alone and have been hurt so very much.

Some days I want to tear down buildings and trees and pull my hair out. You cannot really see that, though; I keep every ounce of hope and saddness and anger and frustration and disappointment and wishing and desperation carefully bottled up behind my mask of a face, because there is no damn room for any of it. Shut up, deal, take care of everything, and give up.

How do you move forward when you feel like you've given up everything at 38 years of age? When you won't get one single thing of substance you wish for? When you will never get to be yourself, feel relaxed, feel happy, feel at peace? Never?

reset, right?

But not really, going back eliminates the experience of ten years and the power to recognize the NEVER AGAINs in my experience. As well as the things that matter, even if it is mostly by the pain of their absence. So, not a do-over. But a turn, change, energize, do it freaking NOW.

but how, right? If I knew that, I wouldn't be here.