Sombre Sunday Spout – Challenges.

So this happened to me on Thursday. Decided to go for a bike ride and lo and behold, as all bad things tend to go, I was in town, on the other end of town, mind you, and I noticed that “Shit, it was a rough ride.” Looked down and uh-oh…

FLAT TYRE. Other end of town. Hm.

I initially thought it was just a matter of filling it up with some air but 20 seconds into the ride, I was jolting up and down on boulders. So I stopped. Got off the bike.

And took a picture. What else would you have expected me to do?

And to prove how far away from home I was, here’s proof.

 So that’s how far I was. If you’re that curious, I suggest Google mapping Harvey Norman and the hospital. Calculate distance.

I decided to walk. With the bike.

 All the way home.

It took me approximately half an hour using all my gathered knowledge of short cuts, running across streets and running green lights, etc.

This picture was taken later that evening. I knew it was going to be a cold one but as I stepped outside to hand a friend a pair of dance shoes and the entire sky was shrouded in a thick mist. The yellow lights at the top of the hospital building set the fog on fire and it looked as though there was a little sun rising from just beyond the trees. I took a picture.

And captured a million little drops of water suspended in the night air. The faint yellow you see in the distance? That’s the yellow light I was talking about.

I think the unexpected fog in the picture was the best part of the evening.

***

So just as a little introduction to what’s going on here, if you were previously readers of my blog, you would know that on occasion, I would put something incredibly sad or emo up here. This, obviously, was disturbing to some and others just didn’t bother to read it at all. Some even took offence, meaning that I’m THAT skilled in making people hate me slightly.

So today (or every Sunday, as a matter of fact) is going to be called Sombre Sunday Spout - [insert subject here] to allow me to be emo and sad and serious so that apart from my usual blogging style (which is usually sombre and sad and emo and serious), there’s a set day during the week that I can rant. Rant? I should think so.

So today’s Sombre Sunday Spout is about challenges. Tough times. Hardships. Yeah. Whatever turns you on, really.

I’ve been through a few. And I’m not wanting to toot my own horn but they haven’t been easy. From standing at a gas station at 6a.m. in the morning ready to burst into tears because final year was just so damn hard and I wasn’t able to keep my grades up to slumbering illegally at a rarely used room in a hospital for several weeks to the nastiest relationship break-up to date, it wasn’t easy. It took a hell of a lot of deceit, a lot of facing up to my mistakes, a lot of taking the punches straight to the gut, a lot of confessions, and a lot of the same food over and over and over again.

Sometimes, I would stop and pause and take a good look at myself at that particular point in time and I would wonder what on earth was going on with myself. Whether this was a product of my own doing or whether I had been cruelly manipulated by unknown deities and that this fate was above and beyond my control.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think I would survive this. I didn’t think I would be here. Today. Now. Every morning when I woke up, I would be surprised that I wasn’t either in Heaven or in Hell. Did I think about suicide? Yeah. For sure. It was the easy way out, the ONLY way out at times, the one thing that I could still control. When everything was spiralling out of control and beyond my imagination, I could have tied the noose, taken the pills, plunged in the knife and ended things right then and there. But I didn’t. I struggled through. Well, not really. Knowing me, that would be like saying that a bear struggled out of a bear trap. It wasn’t easy. But I sat it out. I took each day by each day. Doing what I had to do. One by one. Bit by bit. And I ended up here, somehow.

I look at all of this and I sit and think to myself that somehow, somewhere, I’ve made it through. Yeah, probably by hanging on with the skin of my teeth but I made it through somehow. And I’m proud of myself for doing that. Sometimes, its not so much about giving up. Funny I should say that considering that the last time I went vegetarian, I only lasted 23 hours and couldn’t even last one more hour without meat. But its more about clinging on for dear life and not letting go just yet. To keep taking step after step, just like when I go for a 10k run. As much as it hurts, as much as I want to stop and catch my breath and “walk it”, I keep running. And after that, I collapse, knowing that even though my time has probably not improved and I feel like dying, I did it by running. Call it a slow run. Or even a job. But in my books, I ran it.

You know how sometimes, people toss the phrase “live a life without regrets” around as though its as trendy as adopting children from Zimbabwe? I’ve lived this life. And no, its not without regrets. I look back at what I’ve done and sometimes, God knows, I wished that I never did what I did. I wished that I could have turned back time and done things a little differently. I wished for so many things but unlike a lot of things that I can say I’ve done, I can’t actually turn back time.

Perhaps its more about taking things in our stride. Taking life one day at a time. Enjoying. Savouring. Finding the positives in everything, the good everywhere. Maybe.

I need to go to bed. Today is officially day 8 of 12 days that I’ll be working straight in a row. Oh happy happy joy joy.