Starting Over after Divorce

Just so we are clear, I’ve never been married so I’ve never been divorced. I wrote this article for a client who changed their mind at the last minute and decided they didn’t want to use my services. I’ve managed to find a home for pretty much all of the articles except for this one. I figure I haven’t blogged in awhile so why not post it here. Please enjoy. And to all of you who are struggling to get through a divorce you have both my condolences and well wishes.

Also, you are free to reprint this article on your own websites and newsletters as long as the author bio section remains intact and the links remain active.

Dealing With The Expectations of Others

My goal this month was to try and post at least once per week but life this month has been interesting to say the least. I have to bend my life around the schedule of a 90 year old woman and it hasn’t been an easy feat. I’m used to coming and going and doing as I please so suddenly having to schedule my activities around another person has been something of an adjustment. I still don’t have the hang of it.

Anyway, I didn’t want the month to end without getting in another post. So here I am at Border’s Books enjoying a coffee drink and freezing my buns off. Border’s now has free Wi-Fi but I suspect that to keep people from loitering and drinking all their Wi-Fi juice they crank up the a/c. Every time I come here it’s like 30 below freezing. I’m actually wearing a thick sweater. But I won’t complain. It’s free internet at my favorite bookstore which allows me to do what I love to do which is to write for my blog.

Unfortunately, all of my first draft posts are at home on my desktop computer so today I’m winging it. What’s a good topic? Oh I know. Dealing with other people’s expectations of me.

Thank God It’s 2010

Well, another year has passed taking with it the first decade of the new millennium. I can’t say that I’m sad to see it go. 2009 was particularly challenging for me as it was for millions of others. The new century started off with so much promise. It’s a shame that its first decade ended so disappointingly.

But I will not complain. Instead, I choose to appreciate those hard times. I’ve learned in the last month that while good times bring us the most joy, bad times bring us the greatest opportunities for growth. By experiencing circumstances that were less than ideal, I learned what I didn’t want. And learning what I didn’t want helped me figure out the kind of life I wanted to create which in turned has led to a refining of my goals.

Life is Supposed to Feel Good

For as long as I could remember, I’ve felt bad about life. It started in childhood with physical abuse by a parent. Later, I had the bad luck to crossed paths with two sexual predators resulting in molestation and rape. I learned, pretty early on, to console myself with food so by my teen years I was overweight. When I became old enough to work, I got a job which introduced me to another way to self medicate myself; spending money. By the time I was twenty-five, I had declared bankruptcy twice.

On the surface it would seem that feeling bad about life in general and myself in particular was justified. After all, if I hadn’t suffered abuse as a child or had been taken advantage of by sexual predators or hadn’t been ridiculed or didn’t get into fights with people or had been more responsible with money then my life wouldn’t be in such a state of disrepair. It might even be downright perfect and I would have nothing to feel bad about. Right?

Hello World – Six Months Later

A lot has happened since I last posted. The biggest change has been in my location. I am now living in Florida, though I’m not sure I’m going to stay here. I moved here to help out a family member but now that family member has decided she doesn’t want to live in Florida anymore which has put me into kind of a bind.

I’ll be perfectly honest and say I didn’t want to come here. Mainly because I had a premonition that something like this was going to happen. But instead of heeding the warning, I wrote the feeling off as a fear of change, something that I struggle with more and more as I get older.

But I’d be lying if I said that moving here was a total fail. In fact, I think in about a year I will probably say that being in Florida was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because of the challenges I’ve run into down here, namely not getting a job despite taking my own advice, I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone.

New York Celebrates Good Riddance Day

On December 28th, the residents of New York were encouraged to take part in the second annual Good Riddance Day event in which they were able to throw bad memories of the previous year into an industrial sized shredder.

In an event that organizers hope will become a New Year’s tradition, New Yorkers and tourists were invited to bring bad memories from 2008 to Times Square on Sunday and feed them to an industrial-strength shredder.

“This is the perfect way to move on from a bad year, from a bad experience,” said Kathryn Bonn, of New York City, who shredded a printout of her boyfriend’s e-mail breaking up with her.

This is the second year the Times Square Alliance has sponsored the event which they hope will become an annual tradition. I hope it does too. In fact I hope it become a national event.

Tim Ferriss’ Productivity Video

Tim Ferriss is the author of the book “Four Hour Work Week”. Based on the reviews I’ve read on the internet about it, he redefines what it means to be productive. As a life-long procrastinator, when I first heard about the book, I planned on getting it…someday. It’s not that I don’t think I need a book on productivity. It’s just that I didn’t think it would teach me anything more than that the other gazillion books on productivity out there.

But a link to this video starring Tim Ferris was forwarded to me via email and I have to say that it convinced me to get off my tush and buy the book. The video is worth watching but if you are short on time, I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the main points.

The Power of Visualization

Has it really been over a month? Wow time is just flying by. You’ll be happy to know that I am now gainfully employed at, not one, but two jobs which is one of the reasons why I haven’t blogged in over a month. The other reason is that I slipped into a little bit of a mental rut that I’ve been struggling to get out of for a couple of weeks now. I’m going to share with you exactly what happened because there is a valuable lesson to be learned in this tale.