Hello

Sunset walk 

Hello there.. It's been a while.  I thought I would take this opportunity to get reacquainted with one another.

I'll go first... Hello... My name is Julia.  Today marks the anniversary of a day that I watched in horror as the world as I knew it changed.  But, that's not what I wanted to talk about today.

For some of you dear readers, we may believe different things, worship in different ways, have different ideas and solutions to the problems we face.  But, again, that's not what is on my mind tonight.

This week was suicide awareness and in a stroke of irony, life has dealt us the untimely death of a young man in my community.  He was young; 15 in fact.  He did not make it.  I cannot express how deeply this has effected my family and I.  And I as type these words, the music of what one could be considered one of the saddest songs ever written.  The pain and anguish that is felt so completely in this song is utterly heart wrenching.

It's so strange and surreal for us right now.  This young man had been a good friend to my little one.  They had become quick friends, rode bikes together.  He stood up for my little one when the bully on the bus was being a mean bully.  He was a gem for sure.  And for reasons I will never know of, he took his life.  I was called by the school since they knew that they were friends.  I have really only had one other moment that I could compare the gut wrenching experience this was.  I don't want to ever have to deal with either of those again.  Sadly, death will continue in my life as well as everyone else's.

I have had to deal with death a lot more recently too.  I am not good with death.  In fact, when it comes to me being ok with going to a funeral, I am not the greatest.  I will go to this one.  So will the rest of my small family.  My heart aches for this young man's father.  From what I have been told, his mother had passed.  I can't imagine the anguish and grief of this man.  I am so saddened by it.  My eyes have cried a lot for the whole picture of it.  What we lost, what my little one lost, for his family's loss, the community, as well as a future that was stolen too soon.      

It's not fair.  It's not easy to understand why a young person could not see that there was tomorrow just on the horizon.  I cannot wrap my head around the amount of hopelessness that he must have felt in order to go through with such a thing.  I have tried to tell my baby that we may not always see eye to eye, that there is likely going to be a time when she gets into trouble and I get mad.  But there will never be a time when I will be better off without you.  We are all young and do silly stupid things.  It's not new and kids will do sill stupid things for as long as there are kids allowed to play and enjoy being young.  With age comes wisdom.  Wisdom comes from experience.  Experience, unfortunately, comes from bad choices.  We learn as we get older and hopefully we can be happy.  I mean, that's the goal, right.  To be happy.  To enjoy the little things in life that give us so much joy.  Laughing at each other, playing.  I couldn't imagine a better life than to just be happy.  With life in general.

I hope that I am able to teach my girls this.  I know that with me personally, I have a love hate relationship with myself.  I think I am good person most of the time, but then, I can't say that I'm perfect.  I am sometime caddy and can be a mean bitch.  I don't take to new people at work easily and I am very guarded.  But under neath it all, I am a pretty nice person.  At least I think so.  I have a tendency to self evaluate on a regular basis.  And by regular I mean like every few days or so.  Not all the time or anything like that, which would be better, but, I do try to see what I am doing from an external point of view and see what can I do better next time.  I should do this daily in fact.  But once I take a look, I try to see if I am doing something that I don't like, then I try to stop.  If there is something about myself that I don't like, I have only two choices that I can make about it.  I can either fix it, or deal with it as is.  Sometimes I need to change and I don't.  Sometimes I do change what I don't like.  Sometimes I make stupid choices.  But I try to maintain being happy all the time.  There are days and moments, of course, that I am not.  But one those days I try to remember if I have taken my meds or not, and if I haven't, then I do so at that time.  It's not always going to be perfect, but I can try.

I digress.  It's time for bed for me now.  I am looking forward to a good night's sleep.  Well, I am hoping for a good night's sleep at least.  Good night my friends...