I think I've made a turn for the better... I've been spending more time talking to friends from my previous life where I was happy most all of the time... back in the days where the hardest part of my life was juggling working full time with school full time... my most recent reconnection has noticed that I have evolved a bit... I won't say that I feel like I've evolved into an enlightened being, but I am more aware of how my actions affect those around me... it makes me wonder how much any of us change when we are content (or maybe just too lazy) with our situations... I fought hard to keep a marriage held together by the tiniest threads and you can't make a person want to be there if they'd rather be somewhere else... but I fought for our marriage because I am like most others in that I don't like change... I'd rather be miserable and know that I'll be miserable than to be forced into new situations... change waits for no one... my life changed so quickly that I didn't have a choice... I could either embrace it or hide away... it would have been easy to use the divorce as an excuse to extract myself from my daily world and crawl into bed but that's not my style... so I've had to adapt and adjust to my new reality... and here I am again, a year later and being forced through more change... this really could have been the end of how you all know me to be... this could easily have forced me into a rubber room where they'd take away any blunt objects as I drooled on my ice cream... there are days that I don't remember how I got through it but what I do know is I had my friends constantly surrounding me, making sure that I was taken care of... I went through the motions of being alive but I wasn't there... I put on my show choir face and faked my way through, hopefully convincing the kids that we were going to be all right... the funny thing about standing on that precipice waiting to jump is that it takes more effort to stand still than it does to fall into the unknown... so I have plunged into the unknown with only one certainty; I'm on my own... I can no longer be mad at anyone else for any failures or shortcomings... it's all on me... life cannot remain stagnant if you desire happiness in this world... I could easily hide in my own safe little world where my dear sweet friends will shelter me from the realities of this world but there is so much more that I have yet to explore... so my question for all of you is are you truly content with your life or are you just going through the motions?