Old Habits (sloughed) to New Beginnings

New beginnings are sometimes the result of a shift in thought away from our same old, bad habits. And sometimes they are thrust upon us before we can even manage to process- before we can get a cognition in edge-wise. And as we depart from our former self to transcend into this new being, our old self is sloughed, sloughed over, and left behind.

I used to be the kind of girl that wriggled back into the shed encasement, brought it high up around my shoulders, coiled it around me and stewed. And just when I’d feel I was ready to slink out from under my heavy lead overcoat, I ask myself for "five more minutes," and allow myself at least a few more months. It’s like hanging out submerged in your dirty, lukewarm bath water, pruney fingers and toes, before toweling off. It is a comfortable pity party. As long as you’re the only guest in attendance, "pathetic" is un-termed and "pride" is malleable. Then, someone lures you out from under the weight of the familiar: You remember how light and easy it is to laugh; that all is not lost.

Getting our brains to re-route their usual neuron firing pattern involves that onerous change we hide from. I had been so committed to some ideas, held so steadfastly that I almost considered change to be synonymous with defeat. I never want to consider my time wasted on skin that is going to slough off anyway. But nothing is really waste. At one point, I decided that a real man/woman was someone who made a decision and stuck with it, no matter what. That definition, as well as have I, evolved. Changing my mind didn’t mean completely discarding old ideas, but rather incorporating new ones.

I had loved someone so loyally, that when he was finally as cruel as I’d never known him to be capable of, only then did I really get it. He wasn’t going to change and I wasn’t going to try and make him. Ironically, when we arrived at the end to our 7-year saga, I gaped- watery-eyed- at a man it seemed had changed so remarkably from the man I fell in love with. But alas, I was the one who had changed, evolved so far past him that three tears were all I allowed to fill my murky bath water before getting up and toweling off. I had sloughed off my idealism to pragmatism. I had taken a hit, brushed myself off, and got right back up again.

I consider myself not Satan incarnated as the serpent that offered the forbidden fruit of infidelity to he whose mouth so watered for it, but likened myself more to an impassioned member of the garden itself. I am no femme fatale. Still, I really had no idea that people could be so cruel, but I’m glad that he was. It makes it that much easier to walk away from the dead weight of my former obsession. With not a scintilla of remorse, I have cast-off a die hard old habit for a promising new beginning.