I AM - BECAUSE YOU ARE

Expansion, by Paige Bradley The Story of Expansion – PAIGE BRADLEY To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it’s not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It’s our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness. – Heidi Priebe  

Now, more than ever, I see what a blessing in disguise it was for me when Covid shut the world down just weeks after my weight loss surgery. I am grateful that I had the time to sort myself out, both mentally and physically, and properly prepare myself for re-entry into this new world; not the one that everyone else is living in, by MY new normal. As things are starting to open again, and go back to some level of familiarity, I realize that it is going to be a bit like putting a square peg in a round hole for me. Story of my life, on so many levels these days! Take a spontaneous meal out at a restaurant for example; something we did a few times a month pre-Covid without hesitation. Now, twice in the last month alone I have been caught completely off guard with restaurant and food choices in such a way that I don’t even care that they are all opening again! The first time was on soccer night. I have been preparing a picnic dinner to eat on the field before the LO plays but decided to gr...