Resuming the Blogging Life

After many years away from my blog, I've decided to return.  Why?  You might ask.....

Well, the title of my blog says it all.  It was a phrase from my most favorite (yes, I used the superlative form) book in the whole wide world.  It spoke to me as an impressionable sophomore being taught, at that time, by a not-so-aging hippie English teacher (you know who you are, lady, and you were so, so, so influential in this woman's life) who seemed to have Bob Dylan hanging off her lips and the fresh draggings of the Woodstock earth off her bell bottoms.  I thought she could be my sister; she was the ying to my own mother's yang.  Combined with many other influential women of the English Department of Crystal Lake Central High School, who complemented her free spirit thumbing-in-the-face-of-the-man laissez faire teaching of Salinger and Fitzgerald, and even Flowers for Algernon, I learned to care about people.  I learned that language and communication was the way to heal people.

And so here I am again, trying to make this a consistent habit.  I never seem to be good at "habits."  Either the habit gets the best of me, or I don't get the best of it.  I guess it's my prolonged day-dreaming, my ADHD as my critics would define it, that keeps me from consistency.  For me, in my own little world, I just like to try new things.  I get bored.  I get listless.  I get wanderlust.  For everything - sometimes even people.  In any case, I'm trying to get grounded. I'm trying to stick to a few things and get better at them, instead of being a "Jill of all trades."

One thing I think I am really good at is being the catcher in the rye.  I'm so good at it that it's even come to hurt me, to haunt me, and to rule my own existence.  I can't help it.  I was raised by an adult child of an alcoholic and a dry drunk.  I'm not so new at addictive relationships.  Heck, domestic violence was the modus operandi by which I grew up.

So I tried always to be the champion of the underdog, the "mother hen" of everyone.  I don't think I was bossy, but I became so in my later life, in attempts to grasp at control, and in attempts to remain in control of my own life.  Some way, I got pinned with being an angry person, which if anyone truly knew me understood that was just a mask for my wall I put up that was supposed to communicate, "Don't tread on me."

I hope to write about my story, my life and my yearnings here.  And I hope to communicate to heal.  You might read angry ramblings of my disappointments, my failed relationships, my wounds of inner childhood, but you also might read my blabbering of my successes, my aha moments, my winning the war against myself, and the thrill of victory of my own accomplishments.

I'm just a regular person, but I've had some irregular situations happen to me.  Rather than wallow in the bowl of the pits of cherries, I'm taking control and decorating my bowl the way I like it.  Yeah, there might be some pits.  But I'm going to clean them off, paint them with my colors, and make them to shine like the sun and hold them up for everyone to see.

I hope you learn something. I hope I can inspire you.  And I hope that this will continue to heal me in hearing my words.  Hopefully, I'll can really be my own catcher in the rye.

And while I've been "around the [proverbial] block a few times," the Pollyanna me, the Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm me, the me that wants to love and catch everyone, resists using the winning strategy.  Maybe, just maybe, yes, I do still want to keep all of my kings in the back row.  One thing is for sure, I'm not a phoney.  And yes, maybe by telling the Interwebz, I'm not really telling anyone, so I don't start to miss anyone but my true self.