Step out of your normal

I am by no means what someone would call "normal".  Guess what? No one else is either.  There is no normal.  There is no set pattern or standard that makes normal. Normal is actually just another word for typical. We are all unique. Not one of us is the same.  Our life experiences, choices and circumstances whether negative or positive will help build the person that we will be tomorrow.  We are so very different from each other.  I think that people in general are like chameleons. Stay with me for a minute on this one. When we are young, we learn to adapt to our living arrangements.  Some kids grow up with only one parent which seems "normal" to them.  Kids that grow up in poverty feel that is "normal".  Life circumstances are what surround us everyday to form a comfort zone.  That comfort is what you would call your "normal".  The same thing happens when we date, make friends, get married, work, have children.  In all of those instances, we are intruding outsiders to our "normal".  We conform to a new normal to include the differences in the new person coming into our normal.

There was a movie called The Runaway Bride.  It had Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in it.  In the movie. Julia Roberts character, Maggie, has left several fiancés at the alter.  A New York reporter, Ike, played by Richard Gere, comes to do an interview with Maggie.  He meets with her ex-fiancés to find that with each person, Maggie has adjusted her interests to please the fiancé she is with at the time.  She is engaged again and set to get married.  When Ike digs deeper into learning who Maggie really is, he also fall in love with her.  Ike poses as the groom to help Maggie with her fear of getting married.  They end up kissing at the wedding rehearsal and pouring out their feelings to each other.  The groom punches Ike.  Ike and Maggie decide to get married since it's already set up, and of course Maggie leaves Ike at the alter.  After Ike's findings for the interview, he tells Maggie that he thinks that she is conforming to someone else's interests and therefore not really knowing who she actually is.  After leaving Ike at the alter, Maggie spends time figuring out who she is.  See, during the interviews of the ex-fiancés they each told Ike how Maggie liked her eggs...only the answers were all different.  The part that I remember most vividly is Maggie sitting at the table with like 10 different kinds of eggs trying them all.  She was trying to figure out who she was.  She was trying to figure out which eggs she actually preferred.  I think in a way that we all do this to some extent.  We have to when we combine two people's "normal".  We do it whenever we bring a new person into our normal. 

My childhood was not amazing.  It wasn't what should be called normal.  I think that I have made some life choices because of my childhood, and I also think that I made some life choices in spite of my childhood.  I think we can all agree that life is hard.  We get lost in this world and forget who we are, or maybe we never figure out who we are.  I have rescheduled my Mastectomy and oophorectomy for 2016.  I have one year before I do that.  My divorce will be final in January of 2015.  My daughter is an adult, and my son lives with his dad now.  This will be the first time I have lived alone.  I have always either had children or been married.  I want to figure out who I am. I want to try new things.  I want to figure out my likes and dislikes.  I want to do things that I've never done before.  I want to do the things that bring me joy.  I have decided to spend the next year of my life working because I enjoy both of my jobs.  I am going to take one weekend off each month to just not work.  I know, that's crazy for me and totally out of character.  I am going to actually write down my bucket list and mark things off. I am going to go to my son's baseball tournaments.  I am going to volunteer at the food bank.  I am going to volunteer at the soup kitchen in Austin.  I am going to hand someone a $100 bill for no reason.  I am going to do some traveling, nothing over the top. 
This is a list of things that would like to do (most of these I've never done):

• hot air balloon
• go to New York
• skydiving
• zip line
• go on a hike
• snow skiing
• take pictures of lightning
• water skiing
• drive a boat
• wear a tutu
• ride a city bus
• ride on a train
• ride a subway
• see the Redwood Forest
• fly to Washington and see my friend Sarah
• take my sisters to Vegas
• go on an Alaskan cruise
• see Niagra Falls
• go camping
• kayaking
• dance in a rainstorm
• see the Grand Canyon
• go to a major league sporting event
• do a 5K
• go on an off shore fishing trip
• pet an alligator
• explore Texas sites

These will take years and years to mark off of my list, but I have written them down.  I want to encourage anyone who reads this blog to make a bucket list.  Write it down.  Learn new things about yourself.  Step out of your normal.