2017 is coming to a close and I for one am glad to put this one in the books.  It was a hard year to say the least.  I lost my residence and I could not find another one so I was forced to crash around until I finally came to the conclusion that I had to go back to Memphis and back to my mom’s house.  I never meant to return to this city apart from visiting family.  My mom and brother may call it home, but it has never been my home.  It has been a hard pill to swallow to say the least.  On top of this is the fact that I have not been able to obtain gainful employment.  Things were looking good at the beginning of my return, but I continued to be the one among two that was not chosen.  I am working retail at the moment and I am wondering how long this scenario is going to last.  I have some pots warming on the stove, but none of them are near the salaries I was getting earlier in the year… though they do beat my old salary by more than a bit. 
 
The one thing that has been good about this return to Memphis is the fact that my creative energy is back.  I have been writing again and I have a slew of projects on the horizon.  This is something I’ve been questioning God about… Why is it that my creativity is coming back now?  Why not while I was living in Los Angeles or down in Florida?  God’s response was simple and to the point as is customary for our relationship.  My love of the outdoors and my penchant for being out and about and trying new places and things is a distraction.  Apparently, if I want to blossom in some creative areas I have to take myself away from the fun. 
 
Another area of concern I have had involves church.  The only church I have ever felt comfortable in is Mosaic in Los Angeles.  I finally found a church I was okay with in Jacksonville meaning I liked the pastor and I like the music, but I was never fully comfortable.  I moved shortly after I started to get involved and have been going to church with my mom.  Her church is probably the only close version to the churches I like in Memphis.  The preaching is okay, the music is good, but I always feel extremely uncomfortable when I attend.  I am just sick of visiting church after church and always feeling so uncomfortable… So I asked Jesus why I am so uncomfortable in His churches?  I am still digesting His response… A lot of these large non-denominational churches like that of the ARC churches are known for exerting a great amount of control over the people in their congregations to try and keep the church a safe and healthy place.  The problem is I am picking up on that male domineering control and it is making me supremely uncomfortable to the point that I want to bolt out of the building and get to where I feel safe which is outside in the parking lot.  I am not a cookie cutter, drink the kool-aid kind of Christian and I feel that at this church… you have to be or you just fall of the schedule so to speak.  I feel like God has called me to attend a leadership class at this church and now I have to decide if I can go to the class or if I should vagabond around town until I find somewhere to worship that doesn’t make me want to bolt.
 
While 2017 brought a swarm of unwelcome events, I am hopeful for a stark contrast in 2018.  I am looking forward to getting at least two of my creative projects completed and I am hoping to get a third project up and running.  I am hopeful for new employment that will allow me to get debt paid off and will allow for a path of upward mobility whether with that organization or some place else.  I am just hopeful for a lot of forward movement.  I don’t want to waste time this year… I want to move forward… I want to step into my future.

Well folks, that’s a wrap on Florida.  After a stress filled and tumultuous month of May, I am heading home.  I have come to a standstill on the chest knot after having a diagnostic mammogram, an ultrasound, some x-rays and a CT Scan. The only thing I know for certain is that it is the joints of ribs 5 through 7 and there is absolutely no mass, tumor or cyst to be seen.  While I have not ruled out a form of bone cancer, I would not have the possibility of moving forward until the end of July so I feel okay picking the situation back up when I get on insurance in Tennessee.
 
The nail in the coffin of the state of Florida is the fact that I cannot afford my own place and I cannot find a room to rent either.  I crashed at one friend’s place for a couple of months and left once I thought I had found a nice place to stay through a friend of mine.  Unfortunately, it became very clear that this person had never had roommates before and tried to control my every move and so I had to leave because while I can understand a few ground rules, this person has no say on whether or not I call my sponsor every day, go to church every Sunday or go out to parties with them when they invite me.  So I find myself almost homeless yet again and now I have a different friend letting me crash for a few weeks.  Half of my stuff is on her back porch, part is in my trunk and part is in my room in bags or suitcases.  It is this whole continuing to be homeless scenario that has me ready to go back to Tennessee where I have a nice house I can stay in while I get back on my feet.
 
I have decided to treat my home city just like I would treat any city I have moved to – like I haven’t been there before.  I am going to find groups and Meetups to join, rediscover the churches and just see what happens.  Having my brother around will also be of great benefit since he does a lot of car and truck restoration.  He has already said he can get the water out of my door and fix my seal – something new I am dealing with until I leave rainy Florida. 
 
A lot of my friends are asking if I will be staying this time and all I can say is that I plan staying a couple of years, but you never know what’s around the corner – I could be gone in a couple months or stay a lifetime… I guess I will find out when I head north on 75 in a few weeks. What I do know is the person returning is not the person who left.  After living on the West coast and the East coast – I have changed a lot.  I am not the same person; I have new perspectives on so many things.  But one thing my adventures have taught me is paradise is nice, but it can also be lonely if the people you love are too far away to enjoy it with you.  So here’s to going back home and making the old new again and enjoying time with family.  Hope each of you has a great June too!

It’s been a year since I penned Corralling Part 1 and I never wrote a part two, but then again, this special one is still in her holding pen.  I was driving the other day and reflecting on life in Florida and life in Los Angeles and the vast difference between those two lives.  I was also reflecting on my financial situation, which as we all know was just re-torn to smithereens. I was thinking, ‘how can I be in this situation again! How is it that I keep winding up here.  Why can’t I get anything going for myself!’  And just before I would come to a place of movement, I would think I guess I am just in a burning season.  I have thought this many times before, but this time God had something to say about it.  Abruptly and with force He interjected the following:  You are not in a burning season.  You chose this.  And you keep choosing it.
 
I knew exactly what He meant.  You see, I have a history of talking myself out of amazing opportunities and shrinking back into my little shell.  I also have a great talent when it comes to pulling out all the stops for a job that I won’t like and won’t pay me near what I am worth or need. 
 
I have been going through a CR Step Study so that in the future, I can lead a CR Step Study and we just had our burning party.  In this particular CR, after Step 4 and 5 are complete, we burn our inventories.  Since my focus for this step study was to rip out all of the lies I have believed about myself, I wrote all of those lies down on a couple sheets of paper and threw them into the fire and watched them turn into ashes.  It was only a few days after this that God told me that my so called burning season is due to my own choices and those choices have been rooted in fear due to the lies I have believed about myself for so long that I don’t even know where I first heard them.  Or perhaps I do know where they come from – experiences and events that scarred me and made me think less of myself.
 
This brings me back to that sermon from Erwin McManus that I seem to recount over and over again on this blog and in my life.  That sermon where he asked,  “whose voice are you listening to?”  Whose voice is getting the last word in your life?  Is it God’s voice or someone else’s? 

Well, if you want to know if you are listening to God’s voice then you have to know what God says about you.  While I am not the best at knowing scripture, I do know that according to scripture God delights in me.  He knit me together and considers me a masterpiece.  He loves me more than I will ever understand and while He is not always proud of my actions, He is always proud of the lady I am becoming while I venture through life with Him.  I also know that the Bible says we can do anything He has called us to do.  Maybe that is my hiccup.  Maybe I don’t know what I have been called to do.  I do know that we all have a calling to love God and to love others, but I believe we each have personal callings that match a passion burning within us.  And I am a lady of a million passions so maybe as Kim McManus said the other day, I am overwhelmed by choice so I keep not choosing.  I fear I don’t know how to choose correctly, or I fear I am biting off more than I can chew or maybe my fear in choosing allows the voices that aren’t God’s to flood me with lies and so I choose wrong again.
 
My life is about to get turned upside down all over again.  My roommate situation is ending at the end of March and I am desperately trying to get out of my latest job choice mistake by the end of May.  I am unsure if I will be renting another room in Florida for a few more months or if I will go back to Memphis, but I do know one thing – If a good opportunity that excites me ever crosses my path again, especially in the next few weeks, I am going for it.  100%.  Let the Lion Roar.  I am done with talking myself out of amazing opportunities.  I am done believing the lies.  I know the difference between my gut telling me something’s not right and plain old fear so from now on, - I am going with my gut.  It’s what brought me to Los Angeles and it is what brought me to Florida and one of these days my gut will lead me out of this holding pen. After all, my life verse is Joel 2:25 and I do believe that God will restore the years the lies ate away.
 

They say if March comes in like a lion that it will go out like a lamb.  Is the same true for years?  Let’s just say 2017 roared in and all but brought me to a complete standstill.  For starters I had to say goodbye to the sweetest and fiercest cuddlebug I’ve ever known.  Rosie, the toy stealing Boston, became very ill very quickly and had to be put down given her age.  She needed a very invasive surgery that brought no guarantees so my roommate did the right thing by escorting her to the big park in the sky.  The day she left us I contracted what I am calling a stress response.  I have a neck and back trauma from flying off an overpass about a decade ago.  I believe my stress reactivated this whiplash so to speak and I found myself in constant pulsating sharp pain in the lower back part of my neck on the left side of my body.  I also had limited mobility and I stayed this way for about a week to ten days.  As soon as I was back to normal physically and mentally, my car overheated while I was driving home from seeing a friend.  The red light started flashing and an alarm started going off which I am told was meant to make me pull over, which I did not.  I saw no steam so I figured I would continue driving.  It turns out my radiator was blown and I had to spend a pretty chunk of money on a new one, however, my coolant light was still flashing.  Going on my neighbor and roommates advice I put coolant in with the motor running and found that the small leak I was eventually going to get fixed had turned into a shower under my car.  No Wonder.   I had put about three bottles of coolant in the radiator and people kept asking me if there was a spot under my car and there wasn’t and there never would have been since it only showered coolant while the engine was running. And back to the mechanic I went only to find out that I had two leaks and needed to replace the rest of the components of my coolant system.  My main hope now is that the transmission will last long enough for me to get my debt paid off so I can buy a new car and I know what I want when that time comes… if that time comes, God willing.
 
So as I said in my previous post, my two main resolutions were financial based and fitness based.  Both have been blown out of the water.  I had one credit card paid off and was making head way on the other, but those are both back up at the top of their limits thanks to Christmas and my lovely car.  Then there’s the fact that I have restarted workouts, but am having issues with my upper body.  I am finding it very easy to reactivate my injury and weights are just not in the cards right now.  Though, I am finding it possible to slowly ramp up yoga practice.  So you know there’s some light.
 
This past week I became very angry regarding a co-worker who is now my boss.  I don’t have any hate for this individual and I do wish her the best in life – I just wish her life didn’t have to intersect with mine.  We share an office and she literally goes out of her way every day to remind me that she loves everyone in the office except me.  I have no idea what I did to her but she has been hateful toward me from day one.  This hate drama and the fact that I really need to get out of this job and the fact that I am very unhappy doing this job are starting to take a toll on me.  I just can’t seem to shrug it off and enjoy my day to the best of my ability anymore.  I am beginning to get stuck in an I hate my life mode at work.  It seems that this holding pen I am in just keeps getting smaller.  Every time I think I understand the act of corralling I somehow find myself in a smaller space with even less to breathe.  Being someone who has been touched my cancer and being someone who has stiff armed cancer for going on ten years now, I know that we are not guaranteed tomorrow and that we should each make the most of the time we have on Earth.  And I actually think that it is this “life is too short to not enjoy it” mentality that is getting the best of me right now.  I haven’t been happy in Florida.  I don’t have a community here. My job doesn’t provide what I need on a social, mental, emotional or financial level.  Yes, there are some good things to point out like my living situation, my involvement in Celebrate Recovery and getting to love on Rosie and now Lilly. But, I am at a boiling point. I say all of this to share that this past week in a moment of extreme anger (sitting at my desk and going off on everyone inside my head) my entire upper back and left side of my neck re-clinched and back to pain and immobility I went.  This would be the moment that I realized that my neck and upper back pain and stiffness are in fact a response to stress. 
 
I have shared previously that I am trying to follow the adrenal body type plan in an effort to curb the effect of stress on my mind, body and soul.  It speaks volumes that I can now literally stress myself into immobility and pain.  I have to find a way to deal with the daily stress of life before I literally stop my own heart.  Yes, I am a yogi.  Yes, I know I should know how to calm and center myself.  Yes, I am a Christian and I should have the peace of Jesus.  But I was also an alcoholic for like 16 years so I never really learned how to deal with life, in fact, my way of dealing with life whether good or bad was to drink.  It’s like putting a band-aid on a wound that requires stitches.  Yes, you are covering it up, but it is never going to heal properly.  That’s what my drinking did for me.  Yes, I could get through some really traumatic events like losing my dad and facing my own cancer, but I never learned how to handle life on life’s terms and so while I appear to function appropriately and wisely, I am for all intensive purposes, a raging toddler on the inside.
 
So maybe my new New Year’s Resolution for 2017 should be to learn how to ride the wave of life without letting it steal my inner joy.  Well, you know how it goes… We tell God our plans and He smiles and nods and then He finds a way to tell us His plans… His plans tend to prevail.  I know that much.

In Memory of Rosie, the toy stealing Boston who was as fierce as she was sweet.  Her humans miss her very much.

New Everything seems to be on my docket for 2017.  It’s an everything must go sort of season in my life.  For starters, the house where I have been room renting, is going on the market this month and it is being listed at base price to sell quick!  Second, my car appears to be on its final leg.  I own an Impala and anyone with an Impala from 2000 to 2005 probably knows what I am going through.  Actually, most of you have probably already gotten rid of your Impalas.  According to the Chevy forums, there is nothing that can be done, unless of course, God reaches down from Heaven and puts a stop to all this crazy coolant system nonsense.  Third, after having spent a semester in my new job, I can tell you that I must leave this place!  There is no money at this institution and moreover, people in my department haven’t seen a raise in five years!  That’s just plain crazy.  I do love the holiday shut down and time off structure, but that can be found in other institutions that actually pay their people so ya know… I will be leaving.
 
Change is everywhere right now and I do not know if I will land on my feet or crash on my butt.  The only person I can blame is myself.  I left Los Angeles for some financial stability, but the decisions I have made regarding employment have not exactly helped me attain much of anything close to stable.  So now I find myself at a dangerous cross roads.  I have a decent amount of debt to pay off and am in need of a new car and a new place to live and a new place to work.  My brother has been pushing for me to come back home for a year and while he does make sense numerically, I don’t want to move without a job, which would put me in the realm of blowing my savings.
 
So with all that said, let’s talk New Year resolutions.  You do have them right?  Mine are simple this year and fall into two categories: Finances and Fitness.
 
Financially, I need to get the rest of this debt paid off so I can buy a new car!  And of course, a house would be nice too! The main way to do this would be through a new and better paying place of employment.  I am geographically open, though I would like to move closer to my mom and brother.  I would also like to be in an area with a lot of hiking.  One doesn’t really hike in Florida.  There are tons of trails here, but it is more nature walking so to speak.  Plus I haven’t really been able to find a good hiking group or find any outdoors buddies to go exploring with so I have been at a loss in terms of one of my favorite past times.  I am a professional when it comes to living on nothing, so the challenge will be to keep living on nothing until the debt is gone.  AKA, not buying new things, which is very hard to do once those credit cards start lighting up with zero balances.  Self Restraint is needed indeed.
 
The second category is fitness.  I am not necessarily trying to loose weight, but I do want to be healthy!  I need to get back to eating mostly fruits and vegetables and zero sweets.  I am trying to follow the adrenal body plan which means I need to add in protein.  I have toyed with the idea of bringing seafood back into my diet, but I just don’t feel right about it.  I mean if I can talk to it, I shouldn’t eat it. Right?  I also need to up my morning and evening workouts.  I do yoga every morning, but I need to start getting up earlier so I can get more time in on the mat and I need to be doing an hour of cardio and/or strength in evening when at home.  Once my debt is paid off, I would like to join a gym or program where I can be taken through a series of exercises.  I just do better with someone telling me what to do and making me do it when it comes to workouts.  I am good at doing the workout, but I am also good at making every excuse as to why I don’t need to give 110% or why I need to do the beginner version or the low impact version or ya know whatever.  I have decided to take a picture of myself on the first and last day of 2017 to further motivate me to eat healthy and keep up with the workouts.  Perhaps I’ll share my results with you this time next year. 
 
I guess I do have a third category in terms of New Year resolutions, but I feel that it is going to have to take a back seat until I am in a new job.  The third category would, of course, be my creative endeavors.  I have a few ideas that involve a second blog that is topic focused for 12 steppers and a YouTube channel and I do want to get back into my writing.  Since this is more dependent on the first two resolutions getting off the ground, I will dub this a bonus resolution, which in turn gives me more motivation to make the first two resolutions happen.
 
I wish all of you a Happy, Prosperous and Adventurous New Year!

Looking back at this past year leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  While this past year has brought a lot of personal growth to my life; it has also left a lot of projects and goals undone.  I think the last time I had any fun – I was in Los Angeles.  Geez, has it really been that long since I had a good laugh, danced the night away and enjoyed a night out on the town with a crazy group of friends?  But then I think that perhaps I had to have these past two years of isolation in order to obtain the growth necessary to see those undone projects through to completion.  Perhaps I am just feeling the changes coming in the new year or perhaps I am ready for those changes to take form. Unfortunately, I am one of those people who have to be pushed to the point of jumping off a bridge in order to be willing to make a necessary change in my life.
 
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”  - Anaïs Nin
 
And blossom I must or it is the end of the road for this lady.  I just can’t live with the financial stress anymore.  I just can’t live waiting for the last nail to shoot down from the sky and destroy me.  I just can’t keep enduring needing so many things and living with the fact that I cannot have any of them.  I just can’t live with the fact that there is absolutely no reason for my life to be as painful as it is, for I am the only person holding myself back.
 
And blossom I must so that I can put myself in a position to get a new phone, a new laptop, a new car and an actual place of my own.  Heck, it would be nice to host the holidays at my place.  Never mind the fact, that I am too terrified to live alone and not sure if I will be able to maintain sobriety when I have no one to answer to, but still, it would be nice for my mom and brother to come visit me for once.
 
And blossom I must to give myself a chance at a decent life while there is still some time to play catch up in this grand game.  I am not asking for much, a nice townhouse in a nice area of a nice city, a car that always starts and enough cash to keep up with the days trends for as long as I am on this planet.  I have already let go of the other things I wanted but haven’t yet been able to grasp.
 
And blossom I must for the simple fact that my mom deserves to have some financial help from her kids at this point, because friends and family deserve birthday and Christmas presents for a change, because I deserve a whole hell of a lot more than I’ve allowed myself.
 
And blossom I must for the dreams in my heart and the plans in my head, for the speeches to be given and the books waiting to be written, for the filming and painting and all the things that need to be created…
 
And blossom I must for God did not put me here to flounder, but to flourish and to enjoy His creations as well as my own.
 
And blossom I must.
 
Here’s to a Happy, Healthy and Productive 2017!

Well, California, if it makes you feel any better, I too am in what feels like a burn season.  I lost the job I have been trying to get rid of, had a biopsy done, got rear-ended by a dude in surgery scrubs who wasn’t paying attention and may now loose my car to the wonderful state of Florida who has all the laws it doesn’t need and none of the laws it does need.  As we all know you can kill people and get away with it here in Florida, but to make it easier for killers, crazies and terrorists, the great state of Florida allows anyone to buy a gun with no wait and no background check.  Anywho, that’s a soapbox for another day.  Life can just sweep you off your feet in the worst way possible and that is what it is doing to me right now. 
 
I was able to get another job within two weeks, but the job is still low pay.  I believe it is going to average out to about $20 more a pay check so I guess I can say that I did move up, albeit a very tiny step in the right direction.  The good news is that I have good benefits and much more time off.  My work days are shorter, I get more holidays and I have a shut down at Thanksgiving and Christmas which means I will be able to go home and see my family.  For those of you who haven’t caught on yet, I am now in the field of higher education.  This is a career field I have been thinking about because it is historically good for women, has longevity, great benefits and depending on the university and department within the university – there is ample time off that you don’t get unless you are in education or entertainment production.  All of which are pluses in my book.  So while I may still be in a monetary pinch, I am seeing this as a launching pad sort of opportunity.  I will be learning the ins and outs of a controller’s office and in a few years I can either jump to an internal opening or jump to another university and they have those everywhere!  So it is not all doom and gloom for this gypsy heart lady.
 
The ministry side of life is going strong.  I am taking on some more responsibility in my Celebrate Recovery home group.  Aside from leading the ladies share group, I will be doing more talking in large group, co-leading a fall step-study and getting my teaching feet wet by providing the training portion of the CR leadership meetings.  I love my Friday nights with my ladies and am excited to learn and grow as a Celebrate Recovery ministry leader. 
 
Now that I know I will be remaining in Jacksonville for a while, I need to pick a church home.  I feel like I am repeating my Los Angeles days all over again.  I started out at a church where I felt something was off, but I ignored the feeling and tried everything I could to find a place to belong.  After a year long battle, I stepped away from church #1 and started visiting a couple other churches and one of them became home, my tribe and my life for the remainder of my time in Los Angeles.  I seem to be doing the exact same thing on the other side of the country.  I picked a church and made it home even though I felt something was off, tried everything I could to find a place t belong, but in the end I find myself stepping away.  I guess I am hoping that what happened in Los Angeles will happen here in Jacksonville, that I will find my Mosaic here on the east coast. 
 
While I don’t know what is going to happen with my car at this moment, I do have peace about the situation.  The insurance company is doing everything they can to help me, but in the end, if the bumper comes off and the body shop reports frame damage, I will loose my car.  I have fought and fought to keep my car, but it hit me the other night, that this might be one of those saving grace moments.  If my transmission or some other major repair was suddenly needed, I might not be able to afford to fix the car and I cannot finance a car right now so I would be in serious trouble.  Perhaps, I am losing my car and getting a little cash to buy another one (emphasis on little cash which is the issue) because something is about to go wrong with the car I am fighting so hard to keep.  I can’t see what lies ahead, but Jesus can and He might have orchestrated the whole rear-ending event to save me from something I cannot see.  In sobriety they tell you that you that your life is like an onion.  Our lives, our emotions, our attitudes, our opinions, our perceptions and our actions form the layers around the core of the onion  and it is in recovery that we begin the process of peeling back those layers to get to the core of who we really are.  I feel that I have been peeling back the layers of surrender these past few weeks.  The idea of surrender is a huge component of the 12 steps, but the day-to-day surrender takes on new meaning when you begin to realize that you really don’t have much control when it comes to anything except your response to every day life.  If you are like me and like to have everything done a certain way and in a certain time frame then you have even more of a struggle with the daily letting go and truly letting God.
 
Everything good is grace and everything bad is the stuff Jesus holds your hand through until we get to abide in His arms.  It is hard to take a step back and surrender to a life event, but it is what is required.  We like to think that we have all the answers, but many times it is our decisions and our will that gets us into the tight spots in life.  We thought we were right, we thought we had the plan, but then something happens to shake everything up and we get rerouted and more often than not, we look back and say thank you Jesus for rerouting me out of that disaster!  In order to get rerouted we had to come to a moment of surrender that we did not like and move in a direction we did not want or anticipate, but that decision to let go and move in the direction God was apparently moving, is what rescued us.

Hello from sunny and very warm Florida!  Have you ever had the flu in 90-degree weather?  Isn’t it amazing that when you have those pesky chills that nothing can make you warm!  I even tried wearing a sweat suit while bundled up in three layers of blankets in 90 degree plus heat and it didn’t help me one bit!  Whatever flu I had, I kicked its butt with potent vitamins, plenty of water, detoxing yoga sequences and lots of sleep.  I give the sleep part to God because I honestly don’t know how I was able to stop the nose blowing and coughing so I could sleep like a baby through each night, but I did.  I can also tell that this sudden halt to my life is going to be continuing for a while as my respiratory system is very compromised so here’s to enjoying a slower pace, more yoga than weights and learning the art of what they call an active restful peace.
 
Life in the Bull Pin has been tough although I am finally adapting to my environment instead of constantly trying to escape it.  I started watching a show called Life or Debt and some wheels started turning in my head and I came up with a budget for my current existence.  I had to cut my groceries, toiletries and fun money in half and as a result I am getting rather creative with my food options to stay on budget.  I have been attempting to follow my new budget for the past few weeks and have done well so far.  My goal was to stop having to cut into savings each month especially since I cannot put anything into savings!  This budget is not a long-term fix since I cannot effectively pay off my debt and keep out of savings, but it will allow me to at least make ends meet while I am in the bull pin.  The simple truth is plainer than day:  I cannot stay where I am, but the door remains locked as to going any where else.  And so, I created a budget for the bull pin. 
 
I find that whenever I get sick, it gives me time to reflect on my life and this time around I realized that I have been running myself ragged trying to make Jacksonville work.  When I first arrived here, there were better paying jobs available, but I was burnt out and needing some rest.  Now that I am mentally back in the game, the good paying jobs have vanished.  They are just not here.  The Jacksonville economy is really weird anyway.  There seem to be three sets of jobs available here – an insane amount of minimum wage to high 20K, a few $30K’s and then a bunch of $50K-200K+ jobs that are manager/director level and out of my reach.  Jacksonville is a beautiful city boasting great weather, a river front, the intracoastal waterway and several area beaches, but the economy here is wack and it is probably responsible for the fact that this amazing city hasn’t grown like it should have considering all it has at its finger tips.  Anywho, I kind of got side tracked, but the point I was trying to make is that I have been making myself sick trying to make Jacksonville work.  I sit all day at a desk reconciling things on multiple computer screens, come home, work out, then get on the computer to job hunt and apply to jobs and nothing worthwhile ever seems to come back.  And I’ve literally been doing this for a year!  While I was sick this time around – it hit me that maybe I need to take a step back.  When I first came here, I was told that Jacksonville is preparation – so maybe I need to stop trying to hold on to something that apparently doesn’t want me to hold on to it. 
 
On a brighter note, I had an insane outburst at a festival I attended very recently, but it hit me later that day, that it was my first outburst in weeks!  I have turned a corner in the temper department and I guess I had to have an outburst to realize how long it had been since I had one!  LOL.  But in all seriousness, I am continuing to work on staying calm and being an example of love and grace to all I meet.  It is not easy, but new habits are taking the place of old ones and my outbursts are becoming less and less a part of my life.
 
And now, I feel I am learning the art of really letting go of the steering wheel of life.  I now realize that I have done everything I can to the point of extreme exhaustion to prevent what seems unpreventable – total financial collapse.  I just can’t worry about it anymore.  I just have to let go of the steering wheel.  My new prayer is that I would know when I am taking the wheel out of God’s hands because it is hard to decipher between taking the wheel back and just using plain common sense.  All I know is that I am no longer job-hunting like a crazy person.  On the weekends, as I have time, I will do a local hunt and a national site hunt and if the hammer drops before I land something then so be it.  I will take myself back to Tennessee where I have a house I can stay in rent-free.  Sometimes we have to stop trying to walk or keep up and allow ourselves to be carried.