the new replacement

I have to revise this post because I feel I have done myself a disservice by choosing to share and detail this oh so recent circumstance. My intense emotional state tainted this blog, but instead of deleting it and starting over, I feel as though it is important to communicate how I was feeling at a heightened state. However, I am eager to tell you that in a few days, I will write again on this experience...and then I will feel like I will truly be able to provide a genuine and calmer expression.
Out with the old, in with the revised, and at the moment treading water. I find myself at an interesting crossroads (shocker I know, it seems like I've come to about 2000000 crossroads in the last fifteen minutes). This one feels interestingly different though in the sense that there is familiarity. I left my floral landmark at this one crossroads two years ago, and I am upon it now and recognizing those flowers that I had placed so carefully on the bifurcation.

It is an odd reality feeling that I are now back where I had been once, with the intention of never being back. It doesn't feel like I am taking one step forward and two steps back, because even though it is the same demon, it has a different face. And for that, I am easy on myself.

Lying, cheating, manipulating, plotting, scaming...they all reside under a big veil of fear. To me it is almost a fear of not being okay in my own skin. It is a clear avoidance of being truly who I am, because there is a shell of disquietude. I broke through my shell of anxiety around cheating because that is the face my fear chose.

This time around, it seeped into my monetary livelihood. After being detached financially from my father (well for the most part), I took my relationship with money to a damaging extreme. I was so inclined to SAVE SAVE SAVE just because of being witness to poor behavior of excessive spending. I saw what debt did to people I loved. And in an attempt to never let that happen to me, I drove myself to the far other end of the continuum.

I was so far at the other end, that I would do ANYTHING (manipulate my loving family, lie to my mother's face whom I cherish to my last breath) to "keep a handle on my own war chest." I justified my behavior and took it as a survival mechanism, and that "if I was saving in the end, then it was good."

Well here I am now, coming to this oh so familiar crossroads and thinking...I am ashamed. I am guilty. I am a liar. So many emotions that I had marinated in during nursing school with my cheating loomed above me like a threatening storm. And instead of spending my precious time here on earth to relive that cycle, I am turning my shame and guilt into gratefulness. I am utterly grateful that I am 23 and learning this lesson for good. I am slowly beginning my journey to becoming genuinely selfless, but in order to be that...I had to have learned this lesson. I want to give what I have and more without concern. So I am embarking now, choosing again the high road at this oh so familiar turning point.