Chrissy's Fab 50's

Two days ago I was driving home from our trailer and instead of getting on the interstate to get home I decided to take the back roads.

I had no clue where I was or what the next town was.  I just knew if I kept heading south I would end up at home.

I haven’t taken the back roads in a long, long time.  I used to drive the back roads when I was single and I needed the think thru a problem.  The open road, load music and  fresh air usually helped me solve my problems.

I love taking the back roads.   I love seeing the rolling acres of farm fields and the cows standing or walking lazily in the fields.  I love having the windows rolled down and the tunes cranked.

After ten minutes of seeing farm field after farm field fear settled in my belly and I was getting nervous.  I still didn’t know where I was.   I didn’t recognize anything I was passing.  What if I got lost?  What if I broke down?  Where would I tell my husband I was?  How would he find me?  I wasn’t looking at any road signs so I couldn’t tell him what highway/road I was on.

I looked at my dash.  I had a fourth of a tank of gas left and I was still going south.  I was fine, but I didn’t feel fine.  Why was I so afraid?

Deep down I knew that I would get home safe and sound so why didn’t I just relax and go with the flow?  So what if I didn’t know where was for fifteen minutes?  Would it kill me?  No.

As I headed south I wondered when the last time was that I took a risk like this.  Why wasn’t I doing this more often?  Getting out of my comfort zone and taking a risk?

The last thing I did that scared the crap out of me was starting this blog, but really nothing since.

Up ahead I saw the road curved, but there was a dirt road that I could go straight on so for shits and giggles I took the dirt road.  I thought somewhere up ahead the road would be cemented, but it was dirt for two or three miles.  Fear set in again, but I took a deep breath and enjoyed the ride.  I knew either somewhere ahead I would hit a real road or I would have to turn around and go back (which I really didn’t want to do).   The dirt road finally ended and I turned left onto the cement road.

Five miles down the road and about a half hour into my drive I sighed as I saw a familiar road sign.  I knew where I was!!  Yeah.  I took familiar roads I knew to get home.  It was beginning to rain and I was done with my adventure for the day.

Instead of taking me 45 minutes to get home it took me an hour and fifteen.  What I learned is that maybe I need more adventure in my life.  Why wasn’t I doing more things that scared me?  If I wanted my fifties to be fabulous I would have to get out of my comfort zone and do things that scared me.

Like going after the writing career that I have always dreamed of in my head, but have been afraid to pursue out loud.

I think my three goals for this week is to figure out a tagline for my blog, figure out how to collect people’s email addresses and post a post on First Fridays for everyone to read.  So far I have only told my niece about my blog, but I haven’t let her read it.   I know.  Silly isn’t it?  Fear.

I will let you know how things go.

What are you afraid of?  Please share your story.  Let’s encourage each other and get unafraid together.

 

I started my blog to share my journey through my fifties with others.

I didn’t want the black roses or going downhill to describe the start of my fifties.

I want my fifties to be fabulous  I want each year to be better than the last and I want to put more of myself in every year.

I want to give myself the time and space (away from the hustle and bustle of every day life)  to figure out who I really am and what I really want.  I want to learn how to listen to myself and be my best self.  I want to get to know myself better.

I want to give myself the time to do what I like to do and what is important to me.  I want to look at my life and my priorities and reorganize my life.    I want to listen to my yearnings and give them a chance to come to life.

I want to write.  I have always wanted to write and this is something that I need to make a priority.

I want my fifties to be different than the other years I have lived.  I don’t to speed through life on automatic pilot.  I want to be present.  Fully present.

Hopefully sharing my journey will encourage others that their fifties can be fabulous too!

 

I made $209 at the garage sale we had on Thursday and Friday.  Yeah!!

I’m really happy that I made $209 and I was able to get rid of a lot of unused stuff, but what is most important is that I spent time laughing, talking and eating with my family.

My two brothers, my sister and I hung out with our mom.  We laughed as we remembered silly stuff we did when we were kids with the neighbor kids.

Family is important.  It’s very important.  Spending time together — whether it’s going to a doctor’s appointment, shopping for an hour or two and then grabbing something to eat or just sitting on the porch talking — is something we need to.

Life is short.  We need to make time for what is important.

I am grateful for my family and all of the great people that I have in my life.

Thank you, God.

 

I stopped at the Taco Bell drive thru after work tonight at 10:45 p.m.  I was hungry for a soft steak taco so I thought I would stop and get one.

I ordered and the gentleman told me to drive up to the window without giving me a total.  I thought it was kinda weird, but it’s late and maybe he forgot.  I drove up to the window and he gave me my food.

“Is it free tonight?”  I asked.

He looked me in the eye and said “It’s on me tonight.”

I thanked him and drove away thinking “Wow!  It must be my lucky day.  A free taco.  How cool is that?”

Then I started questioning it.  Why did he give it to me free?  Did the car before pay for my taco?  If so, I definitely need to pay it forward the next time I go through the drive thru.  Or maybe he was just being a nice guy and wanted to do something nice for someone.

But why me?  What did I do in the grand scheme of things to deserve a free taco?

As I drove further I started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t eat it.  Maybe someone made the wrong taco and it was sitting there for awhile.  Would I get sick?  Maybe he’s some weirdo that gets off on doing weird things to people’s food.  Maybe I should throw it away when I get home.

Then my thoughts went back to why me?  I started to get angry with myself.  Why not me?  I’m a good person.  I deserve good things.  Don’t I?

Why do question good things that happen to me?  Why do I doubt I deserve them?  Isn’t there someone else more deserving?  Why can’t I just accept them graciously?

Is this what I do with all good that comes into my life?  Push it away.  If so, why?

I think this is one thing I need to ponder in my life.  I think I do push good things away and I’m not sure why.  I think this is something I always do and I don’t even realize it.   I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because I don’t want to draw attention to myself.

Why did he give me the free taco?

Maybe it’s the universes way of telling me I’m doing the right thing by letting go of the things I’m putting in the garage sale.

All this over one free taco.

I do have issues.  🙂

 

 

 

 

 

For the last two weeks I’ve been going through every drawer, cabinet and box in my house and gathering stuff that I don’t need or want for my upcoming garage sale on Friday.

Every morning I would decide what room I was going to go through that day and I would go from there.   After awhile I could look at something and know whether I was going to keep it or not.   It was a weird feeling.  It was like my intuition was kicking in.

It’s exhausting going through every item and deciding if it should stay or go, but it is totally worth it.  My drawers and cabinets are organized. It’s really nice to open a drawer or cabinet and be able to find what I need right away instead of having to dig through everything.

I look at my pile of garage sale stuff every time I go in the basement and smile.  I’m proud of myself.  It takes a lot of guts to do a massive purge.  You never know if you may at some point need what you are letting go of.  It’s a risk, but a good risk.

I feel lighter.  I feel myself sometimes letting go of anger and sadness during the day.  I just take a couple of deep breathes and let those emotions go.  I know there are emotions attached to what I want to sell and it’s important to let them go.

I can feel myself moving in a different direction, but more about that later.    I still have a couple of more cabinets to go through and stuff to mark before Friday.

I can’t wait to see what comes into my life after I let this stuff go.

I can’t wait to share this adventure with you.

 

 

 

 

 

My mom, sister and I have a garage sale every April.  Usually it’s around my birthday  (April 28th) and we have cake and ice cream.  My aunts and my mom’s neighbors come over and we eat, talk, laugh and sell stuff.  It’s so much fun.

This year my husband and I want to buy a house.   Some of the houses we looked at don’t have finished basements.  The house we currently rent has a finished basement and we have a futon, two end tables, a tv stand, tv, dvd player, a coffee table, and a lot of other stuff downstairs.   My step daughter and her cousins used to play and watch movies in the basement, but now that they are older and have jobs the basement hasn’t been used in years.

We decided to downsize and put all of the unused furniture in the sale.

This lead me to think of other areas in my life I need to downsize which lead me to ask the following question:

What am I going to need to keep for the 2nd half of my life?  What items nourish my soul?  What items show my real self?  What items do I LOVE and have to keep?

These questions go thru my head as I go thru every drawer, cabinet and box in my house.

I realized I’ve been hanging onto stuff because I think I may need it someday.  For example:  I have this Walkman in the top drawer of my nightstand.  I’ve had it forever, but rarely use it.  I want to use it.  I have tried to listen to motivational CD’s before I go to bed, but I always fall asleep and never finish the CD.

So why do I keep it?  Because for some reason it pulls at my heart strings because what if I want to listen to the CD in the future and I have nothing to play it on.  I know this is a really goofy reason to keep something.  I have a CD player in my truck so if I need to listen to it I can do it while I’m driving.

I marked it yesterday and put it the garage sale bin.

Why are we so afraid to let things go?  Why do we hang on (sometimes very tightly) to stuff we don’t need, use or want.

I think as we head into the 2nd half of our lives we need to figure out what we need of our current possessions and let the rest go.  Only keep what makes your hear sing.

I can’t keep stuff because I am afraid to let it go.   I have to let the item go and release the fear and move on.

It will be hard this year to watch all of my stuff go.  My hope is that the people that buy my stuff will need it and like it as much as I do.

All of the money we make will be going toward whatever we need for the new house…paint, wall decorations, etc.

Out with the old and in with the new!

 

 

 

I wonder what kind of space my journals take up in my psyche.

I’m hanging onto them.  Not really letting go.  Shredding a little at a time.  I don’t need them nor do I want them, but I still have them.

Is all of the pain and anger and sometimes happiness of my pages in my psyche?

How do you envision your pysche?

I like to think of mine as a bunch of rooms in my head.  Some rooms are bigger than others.  Some rooms are painted neon pink and have happy stuff in them while other rooms are dark and dingy.

I visualize the room where my journals are is dark and full of spider webs.  The door creaks when I open it.  The chair in the corner has a dead fly laying in an inch of dust. In the corner across from the chair are the bins my journals are in.   The tops of the bins are covered in dust.  There is a single light bulb in the middle of the room with a pull chain.  I think I was going to read them at some point, but never got around to it.

Is there negative energy in the room?  Or is it just stale and heavy?

Is holding onto my journals holding my back from something I really want to be doing….like writing more?

What would this room look like if I shredded my journals?  Maybe there would be daises painted on the wall and a cd player in the corner with some chanting cd’s next to it.  Shelves with all of my books on one wall and a big overstuffed chair on the other.  My desk in the corner.

I know I’m probably getting carried away, but I have been thinking about this for awhile.

I think as I shred my journals something opens in me.  I think that part of me is going through a transition  The space that my journals occupied empties and fills with something else.

I wonder what that something will be.

I will keep you posted.  🙂

Have a great Thursday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had my colonoscopy two days ago and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

I didn’t want it.  I dreaded it.  I bitched for two weeks prior that I had to do it.  I didn’t want to drink the stuff or take the pills.  I was pissed that I couldn’t eat for a day before the procedure.  I was emotional.  I worried about getting sick and/or shitting all over the place.  I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the procedure.

I just didn’t want the damn procedure.  Ever.

But I did it and I’m happy I did.

Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  I started drinking as much water as I could handle on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.   Flushing out my system early helped because I pooped three times on Friday and Saturday so that when Sunday came I didn’t really have the much to get out.  It was as if my body knew what it had to do and was helping me along.

I ate at midnight for the last time and I slept til 11 a.m. so there was only a four hour gap from when I got up til I had to start taking the pooping pills.  I really wasn’t that hungry.  (it was the commercials that made me want to eat something.  i never realized that there were so many food commercials on tv)  I had two orange jello cups and two cups of bouillon during the day and I was fine.

The test itself is a breeze.  The drugs were good.  I was in the middle of a conversation with the nurse in the OR and the next thing I knew I was back in my room.

I have three poylps.  One wasn’t precancerous, but two were.  The precancerous poylps could have possibly turned into cancer in three to five years.  I consider myself very lucky.

After my procedure I rested and watched tv  and gave myself a break for the day.

Please schedule your colonoscopy today.  It might not be a bad as you think.

 

 

I put my bin of journals back in the basement.

Sigh…

I don’t know why I thought I could get the shredding done in a couple of days.  After taking a closer look I realized that there was at least a thousand pages or more (probably more) of journal pages in the bin.

Four bins of a 1,000 pages or more.  I guess when you don’t look inside of the bins you forget what is there.

It’s going to take longer than expected….way longer.

Usually I would journal in a college ruled notebook, but in this bin I chose to write on college ruled loose leaf paper.  There are pages and pages and pages of loose leaf paper in the bin.

I didn’t leave the bin upstairs because I didn’t want anyone reading my journals.  As I was shredding I was skimming through the pages and I realized that I don’t want anyone to read them.  The pages are my private thoughts about what I was going through at the time and not anything else.  It’s how I chose to express myself at the time.

As I was skimming I did pick out pages that struck a cord in me or experiences that I forgot about and put them away for a later date.

I don’t know how I am ever going to get through all of these pages.  I think what I am going to do is just grab a handful when I have a couple of minutes and skim, keep and shred.

Luckily my mom’s cousin has a hobby farm.  I can shred and give the bags of shredded journal entries to her to use as bedding for her animals.

It’s all good.