Journal 117 After All That

Sam: "By the time my mother was my age, she had three kids and a drunk husband."

Carrie: "You just have three drunk friends!"

Sam: "BY CHOICE."

After all that it was a pretty great workweek. See what I mean?
Weird.

Something I've been working on: A very negative post entitled "When you suck as a person".

I could take aim at this, and do that whole "you know who you are" route, but as I was

saying to my dear friend L. in a conversation this week, I guess I will continue (ahem) to "take the high road". But as I detailed to her in the following conversation, (paraphrasing, again, I have near total recall but I'm not 100%) I do have my reasons for wanting to write that post....here's the conversation in a nutshell:

Me: "Guess who's in an institution?"

Her: (gasping) "WHO? Someone we know??"

Me: "YES".

I tell her who it is.

Her: "OH MY GOD."

Then we quoted lines from Sex and the City for about fifteen minutes. That's how we roll sometimes.

Her, in her Samantha voice: "Well, let's face it honey. YOU WON".

Me: "Yea, I know. I know."

My dear friends T. and my other L. said the same thing, that they were so happy things turned out the way they did for me.

As other L. so succinctly put it: "You got soooo lucky!"

I know that too and I'm not really a person whose life has been based on luck too much, especially good luck.

My friend N. characterized the last two-odd years of my life as "the highest of highs and the lowest of lows".

Ain't that the truth.

And as my friend A. said to me, on a visit about a year ago, when we were standing on the very corner where what I can honestly say that my f*cked up s&m relationship finally ended:

"He gave you a gift, Carolyn."

I know that too.

Now.

Then it was clouded with pain, with hurt, with the betrayal, with my father's diagnosis, with my topsy-turvy life.

My sister and my mom, gentle souls that they are, felt pity.

Oddly, I felt none. I felt an absence of feeling. There was an odd curiosity to it all, a kind-of voyeurism that makes us stare at car crashes, gives us that "schadenfreude" feeling that can sometimes be, let's face it: Oh so delicious.

I'll continue work on that other post along with dear me part two, and I'll finish this post off

on another positive note:

All the friends and family mentioned in this post are the ones who helped me win.