You know what soap-bubbles, expectations, and assumptions have in common? The amount of substance they’ve got. lol Test your assumptions – be really brutal about investigating what supports your opinions. If you’re wrong, you most likely would benefit from knowing that. Those expectations? They aren’t real at all. Just made up shit in our thinking that we wander around with as if we have some reason to … crap, how do I not use either “expect” or “assume” right there. We gotta knock that shit off.

Ask. Clarify. Observe. Question. Test. Check. Double-check. I’m not talking about deep-seated insecurities being re-verified constantly. Not even a little. Kind of the opposite. I think I’m trying to describe the balance a secure being must find between their contentment and their future, using choices – choices ideally made based on an understanding of the world, and their own life, such that the outcome is as desired, mostly, generally speaking. It’s very hard to do that when we let ourselves live in a soap-bubble.

One more soap-bubble pops as I move through life. Shit got real, and not in a pretty way. My Traveling Partner is safe. Our friends are safe. The bullshit and drama that went down probably cost us all a lot more than we’d have been willing to let go of. Many thousands of dollars were burned up (metaphorically) in a savage display of uncontrolled fury and mental illness. Fucking hell. There is profound risk in giving people “second chances”, and new beginnings don’t always turn out better than old bullshit. Sometimes we have to look at the balance sheet and admit that we can’t afford to give that person more chances; it is too costly, emotionally, or financially. In this case? All the things. It was a poor choice to put any eggs in that badly woven damaged basket.

Once more for the folks in the back; no amount of your anger justifies destroying other people’s property, robbing them of their sense of safety or security in their homes, acting out against them in violence, or saying some of the vile shit human primates are capable of saying when they are enraged. It’s not okay. Do better. You are making choices.

Does this experience, that may have actually cost me 10s of thousands of dollars in destroyed or damaged art work (of my own) cause me to reconsider being willing to love, to trust, or to begin again? No. It just reminds me that assuming positive intent is not an assurance of actual positive intent, in fact. It reminds me to test my assumptions, to avoid implicit expectations, and to be willing to walk on when things don’t work out, with no looking back. My good heart gives second chances. I hadn’t previously given an ex, an actual ex, a “second chance”, before. I am unlikely to do that again. But the terrible behavior of others is no reason to compromise my own good nature, or be dissuaded from being the woman I most want to be. I decide who I become. Those choices are mine. There are verbs involved.

I left the office yesterday trembling with stress, triggered, and on the edge of tears, in a hurry to get safely home so that I could compulsively check for reassuring communications from loved ones, and check in with others that they were okay, too. I needed that for me. What’s new and beautiful and makes this experience, after-the-fact, pretty powerfully positive; I bounced back. After a few quiet minutes meditating in the car before I began my commute, I was emotionally safe to drive, calm, and “okay”. By the end of the evening, I was able to sleep.  I woke rested, and the day ahead, for all obvious purposes, appears to be a fairly ordinary one. (Although, to be fair, yesterday got off to a great start…)

I wish my Traveling Partner and my distant loved ones well from afar, finish my coffee, and get ready to begin again.