I decided to start this blog today.

I need an outlet to share myself and gather my thoughts and put things in perspective. Therapy is also extremely expensive and while I am sure I will one day need to reach out and pay someone to listen to me understand my life, this seems a little easier. I am listening to Sheryl Sandburg's "Option B" and it was poignant for me that at one point she said that it is important to write in a journal to help go through any difficult process. I thankfully type faster than I write and by end of day my penmanship looks unrecognizable. So starts my journal.

I am tired of sharing some things with my friends as they have their own lives. I can't share everything with work colleagues or patients - it isn't deemed professional and I hear that you aren't supposed to @#$% where you eat...or in this case...work....and I hardly think that my 2 year old and my almost 5 year old daughter would be interested - let alone what kind of therapy they would need for years to come after. And my thankfully supportive husband doesn't want to hear a broken record day in and day out. So that leaves me here.

I am burying my father's ashes tomorrow. He passed away earlier last year and it has been hell for me since. He is survived by me and my mother and my brother, neither who wanted his ashes. Personally I think that there is something pretty wrong and shitty about that but I hear that people grieve differently. I have kept him in a box in my garage since receiving his remains, a box of cold meaningless ash that is nothing of the man that I remember in my head and in my heart.

He was a complicated and accomplished man - and like everyone in life...you win some, you lose some. I hope that when he is looking down on me from heaven or wherever he might be in the spiritual world that he feels that his daughter was one of his wins.

Since the loss of my father I have contemplated many things... I have learned a lot and realize that ignorance truly is bliss when it comes to death, taxes, and that the hype of growing up was over-rated. My daughters have it pretty good I have to say. Over the past year of my dad passing I had a few amazing yet fleeting highs but I have had many many emotional lows and I sadly see more in my foreseeable future. I am so grateful to have my own daughters and my supportive husband. And through the shit and the emotional baggage I realize that I practice daily...not yoga...not meditation...but my current motto of "survivorism." At this moment in my life it's the only way I know how to live....survive.