Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The amount of time and activity that has passed between each of these all-too-weak blog posts is embarrassing, and amazing. I am constantly in a state of surprise at how quickly the time passes, even while seeming to drag along. I constantly wonder what it is I am racing towards, and if, when I get there, I will feel as if I missed some important part, some space that was supposed to be populated by a deep breath, some fresh air, a renewed sense of self, and an actual decision about my future.

Decision-making has become more important to me, as of late, because in January I lost the ability to make decisions, and became a bystander to my own...fate, for lack of a better word.

When I last blogged, I was in love. Terribly, wonderfully, totally taken with it, in love. I actually (I blush a little typing this) didn't know love could feel that way. I didn't know how deeply I could be consumed by my affection for another person, how completely it would permeate all the different layers of the person I thought I was.

And as a result, I couldn't begin to understand how badly it would hurt me if I lost it, which I did. In December, the man I love(d?) returned from two months in Mexico, to a version of myself that seems remarkably distant, and ended our relationship, in a fiery showdown in a hotel lobby, two weeks before I moved to Minnesota to be with him.

It almost reads like a movie, but it wasn't, and it was heart wrenching. It still is heart wrenching, every day, and I'm still trying to work through it. But as I recover, or perhaps rediscover myself -isolated from the large whole into which I had so happily and unwittingly been subsumed, I am trying to return to that list of things which "I've always wanted to try." And this blog is one of them.

I lost decision-making capability on another front in January, as well. In the day before Paul and I finalized our break up (I resent the use of 'I' as an actor in this sentence), I submitted a single graduate school application - to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, a program about which I cared passionately, until Paul came home from Mexico, at least.

On that front, I am pleased to discover that my decision-making capacity has been restored, at least temporarily - I find myself admitted to Yale for 2008, although I'm not sure I can enroll without taking due time to mourn, some more, and to find myself, first.

So that's where I've been, and that's why the title. I was off between a rock and a hard place.