It's About to Get Real

This post is the first in the series, Get Real. Please stay tuned as I go through this journey of self discovery.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you probably know that the quantity of my posts has severely decreased. There are many reasons for this and I'm sure I've addressed it before. But have I really been honest?

I want to say that I have. I want to say that when I look back on this blog I'm going to read it like I would an old diary or journal. Actually, it will probably be worse. I'll probably be more mortified because this is public, my old diaries are not.

Very quickly after I got married life got hard. That's not to say that my life didn't have sweet moments or fulfilling ones. It just got hard. We were looking to rent, and somehow we ended up buying a foreclosure. I damaged one at that.

We moved into my father-in-laws house and immediately started construction to make it livable. Now, when you picture any newlywed, moving into an in-laws house, having construction done on their first home... It sounds like it could be a TV show. Everyone knows marriage is hard. But everyone thinks that newlyweds go through this blissful stage their first year. Yeah, no. That so doesn't happen. It would be amazing if the first year of marriage was like two sides of a zipper, fitting together perfectly and securely.

Unfortunately, people are not perfectly cut. We are jagged and broken, we have scabs and scars. It's hard to fit two jagged pieces together, isn't it? Same with people. Taking two lives and melding them into one smooth operating machine is a pipe dream. It's hard with a capital H.

I'm NOT saying it can't be easy. There are personalities that are just easy. I am SURE that more than a few people would be like, our first year of marriage was full of rainbows, unicorns and butterflies! However, in our case it wasn't.

We had fitting-together pains. Heaped upon that were the growing pains of buying a house, coupled with living with an in-law. Topped with a cherry of working 40 hours a week while trying to make sure the contractor freaking. showed. up.

You know those people that can handle fifty-thousand stressful things at once, all day, every day and they are fine? More than that, they live for it? Hi. I'm not one of those people. I'm great under pressure. I can juggle a thousand things at work. What I cannot do is juggle a stressful job, a stressful relationship, a stressful marriage, a stressful house, physical and financial stress all at the same time. I can handle some of those things together, but not all of them at the exact same time.

To bring it all together, for the past two years and five months I've been dealing with all of those together. And after a while of pushing through I just gave up. I stopped fighting. I don't have the motivation to fight all of them at once. I do the bare minimum in order to survive. I don't feel like I am thriving right now.

I feel like I suck at life because when I wake up in the morning I groan and think, "No. Not again." I get ready and head to a stressful job that I love. After 7-8 hours, I drive home to a stressful husband that I love. The last thing I want to do is clean the litter box. Or make dinner. Or THINK of making dinner. I don't want to scrub toilets or floors. And ew, don't even talk to me about exercising. I do the bare minimum to just get through the day. If I have to do laundry I'll do it. If I have to go grocery shopping I'll go.

Where is my joy? My zest or zeal for life? I'm a Christian and I feel like a failure because I pray every day for God to change my heart. I 'fake it' hoping that he'll follow through on my actions with feeling. So far, it hasn't happened.

I hope this doesn't sounds complainy. That's not my intention. I am not unhappy. (Well, I am unhappy about how much a weigh. Gross.) But, I'm missing a key ingredient in my life. I feel like a cake that is sunken in the middle. Why?

In an effort to be as cheesy as possible, that is the million dollar question. Why do I feel this way? Where is my joy? What can I do to fix this? Is it even fixable? Can I strip my feelings down to find the source?

I'll be posting as I go through this journey. I don't know if it'll be every day, once a week, or once a month. This is all in real time, so however long it takes I'll be writing.