Begone with ye, 2016

2016 was a year, wasn’t it? It was, inarguably, a year. 366 days. Some good, some bad. I think that’s really the extent of being able to remain factual on the topic.

The good:

• I published three books, two of which had been barely-formed ideas that I was going to circle back to later. Furthermore, I was caught completely off-guard as two which one would be the most popular.
• I’ve had the same job for over a year now. First time that’s happened in five years.
• I’ve reformatted my home into a floor plan that’s actually navigable by people, fairly easy to keep clean, and disposed of a great deal of clutter.

The bad:

• Having gotten my house into a floor plan that I can manage and enjoy, it makes a perverse sort of sense that I’ve been hanging onto it by my fingernails for the whole year. There is a story behind the newly decluttered and barely-afforded house, and it’s sort of happening in reverse order in this post. While my job is steady, the pay…well, it could be a lot better for what I do.

The ugly:

• I’ve spent the entire year navigating a real minefield of a divorce (which, granted, is a process that began at the tail end of 2015 – merry Christmas!). For obvious reasons, I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on that, other than to point out that it wasn’t my idea, and it wasn’t something where I fired the first shot. But I will offer these observations for those who haven’t walked down this path: it is not, and never will be, what you expect it to be. You might be thinking “freedom!”, but – particularly if there are kids involved – the reality is that you wind up chained to the other person like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, unable to permanently dislodge yourself; at this point it’s almost more of a “’til death us do part” than the marriage itself was. The kids might appear to be wonderfully resilient, but the fact is that they’ve taken on board what they’ve witnessed with regard to empathy and compassion, and begin reflecting that behavior themselves in unexpected, occasionally alarming ways. You find out who your friends are, and who’s merely a fair weather fan, and who is so uncertain of what to say that they back away like your divorce is somehow contagious. You find out what your tolerance is for depression and anger. (So does everyone else.) It is not, and never will be, what you expect it to be. And it takes two people to really start the nose dive.

The new:

• I’m working to improve my health (both physical and mental), my eating habits, and my happiness. After my birthday in 2017, I will be the same age that my mother was when she died. That’s been on my mind a lot. My sons have been through enough in 2016. I owe it to them to try to stick around longer.
• I also owe it to them to be their dad, first and foremost at all times. They are welcome in my home anytime. When my mother passed away, my father began making choices that, to put it charitably, weren’t really conducive to the continuation of the rest of the family. I intend to break that cycle before it even becomes a cycle. Any other aspects of my life are secondary to this. I loved my dad, but I really do think this is a case where he turned one direction and I intend to travel in the other direction.
• My home is open to my friends. That may seem like such a weird thing to say, because most people would say well, of course your home is open to your friends. Except it hasn’t been that way. Somewhere along the way, it became a fortress with a moat around it – none entered. No one dared to extend invitations. Some of that was because of the major physical discord of the house, but I think it was also the mental discord of its inhabitants. I became isolated from friends; I could never invite friends over, and on those rare occasions when someone did come over, well, there’s a British expression, “staring daggers” at someone…one by one, those friends who did come over commented on that…and then they stopped coming over. No more of that. I’ve spent the past year transforming my home into a nerdy sanctuary that makes it easier for me to hang onto my own happiness as all of this is going on. But it’s not meant to be a hermitage.

It’s been one hell of a year. Hopefully this one will be more merciful, both on the micro and macro scales.

I wish happiness to you and yours, as I keep working to hang on to just a little bit of happiness for me and mine.