closing a year …and a decade

Closing a year … and a decade

It is a closure of a year …

As with every year, like packing our clothes from one semester to the other… somehow all our memories are spread on the bed of our all-year incidents, events and occurrences as we start reminiscing, summoning up and recollecting all what took place with its goods and bads …

This year is quite different to me.

It marks a whole decade since my decision to get a divorce. A real damn decade has passed and I have no damn clue how I survived it.

Each time the idea of a passing decade surpasses my mind. I stop… and as in packing for the new season in a last moment. I feel like pressing all inside that closet telling myself … lets say a quick goodbye.

But it still seems hard not to stop, and there is no way I can even go over a recollection of a ten year of an experience that went on me like an avalanche that seriously changed my life into an upside down turnaround that I never even imagined may exist.

For another strange reason, I totally forgot that it has been a decade. This year was even the first year that I forgot the day of my leaving what used to be home for me for more than a decade. Well, I only left the man and the house!!!

It all feels like entering a skyline … or jumping over a horizon into a different time zone …and time. And yet I still look at myself and succeed to see me and I cannot believe it … and I scream to myself with a serious surprise: “ You made it. “

No, I am not a survivor. I am not someone who is even close to understood how to be a hero and what a hero is. I do understand who a hero is and it is not I.

Even though, there were times that I only tried to survive. It is so harsh. Incredibly harsh to live in order just to survive. I am still too scared to touch on all those times. Even though I always, most of the time used writing to express many of what I went through. It practically helped me and saved me in many ways to cope and to feel I am not alone in this place on earth. Writing and sharing helped me rationalize my mind in many ways, gave me courage perhaps, but above all, feeling that I was not dumped by the universe in times I was totally scrap heaped by the closest circle.

Surviving a decade that included stalking, attacks, threats, attempts to starve me and my children, expulsion from the close circles of what used to be social life, fighting in courts in numerous unjust accounts.

Struggling to make a living between what I aspire to do and remaining respectable. Between feeding four children and securing a decent life for them. Between being a woman and a mother.

When suddenly, I found myself having to perform in nothing but the best, as a mother, as a woman, as a friend, as a father, as a psychologist, as a mentor, as anything that any situation required…

Going through a decade.

Yes a decade …

With bending sometimes, stretching other times. Standing stiff as an oak in times and flipping like a turtle in others.

With failures and achievements

With falling down and getting up

With losing hope often and touching love sometimes

With sorrow and happiness

With pain and joy

With resentment and forgiveness

With war and peace

Memories….

That are rushing to my head as a stream. And somehow should be just allowed, maybe … to run into my sea of life…

Somewhere , I should give a line to each and every person who entered my life … naming and counting will be meaningless …because regardless to how little and big ,the presence of each person has been ; a pebble ,a stone , a rock or even sand or soil… the effect has been always as important and vital to the person (me) who managed to make it out through this loop of a whole decade , miraculously , a survivor , because of you .