I know you have all heard the saying that holding on to anger is like trying to kill your husband by drinking poison yourself; well it is something like that.  Last week I received a phone call from a woman who just began to spew anger, not at me, but on me.  I was having a perfectly great day and in 20 minutes I was a puddle on the floor.  I was a wreck.  It was as if I had stepped into quicksand.  My mind was transported back to the terrible years I spent living with heartache and anger before I left my marriage.  I actually began to sweat, physically sweat, while she was talking to me.  I understood her pain, but I didn’t want to be part of that world any longer, and just hearing about it made me so sad.  I thought to myself, “how did this just happen?  How did I go from happy and looking forward to the weekend, to a red-faced woman with tears and snot running down my face?”  I know you can’t make yourself let go of past issues, that happens in its own time.  But, you can give yourself some guidelines, or rules, to follow that will help you have more good days than bad.  When you are armed with your own “blueprint” of who and what you want in your life you are released from so much of the bad.

My Blueprint

My rules, the ones that I try to live by, are pretty simple.  I have learned that if I am dreading seeing someone, whatever the reason, it’s time to give that relationship another look.  It may not be a friendship that is worth keeping.  Of course, if it’s a relative, there is no getting out of it, good luck with that.  But you can move friends who constantly bring you down to a lower “importance” tier on your imaginary chart.  If you feel guilty about that, don’t.  It puts you in a bad mood and why would you let someone do that to you?  You are doing it to yourself!

A more serious matter is betrayal.  If I feel that someone has betrayed me, and there are lots of levels of betrayal, I’m most likely out.  Once that trust is broken I am probably never going to get it back.  I’m just not.  Whether it is a friend, spouse or co-worker, we are done.   Remember, these are the rules that I follow, and they don’t have to be your rules.  One thing about being older is that I know myself and what works for me.  I thought I could bring my marriage back from the dead once, but looking back, there was no way.  I was sleeping with the enemy, literally.  I wasted fifteen years trying to figure out how to like my husband when the answer was right in front of me: I was never going to like him again.  Sadly, betrayal won that battle.

That is my blueprint, but it doesn’t have to be yours.  You may be a person who is able to work through betrayal and that is great for you.  Or you don’t want to sever a relationship that isn’t working, whatever the reason.  That’s OK.

Forgive and Move Forward

No matter what rules you live by in the friendship/relationship piece of your life, start to notice how you feel when you are with certain people.  Are you excited?   That’s perfect.   Are you clenching your teeth?  You might want to re-think that one.  And, what about forgive and forget? Forgiveness is a wonderful quality and one we should all practice.  But, forgetting is a mistake in my book.  One thing we old girls have is experience, and to forget what we have experienced would be to erase our past.  I say, forgive and move forward.  You should take what you know and put it in your back pocket for the journey ahead.

Grow Younger

Are you still wondering where the grow younger part is?  Well, people tell me all the time now how great I look, and I know they aren’t talking about my body!  They are talking about my face: I knocked ten years off my face by leaving a bad situation.  I can even see it in the mirror, so I know they aren’t blowing smoke up my bottom.  Letting go of the muck that I was living in has actually made me look younger, something all the botox and fillers in the world couldn’t do.  I promise if you let go of some of the things that are on a reel in your mind running over and over you will look, and feel, younger, too.  Take a look at the photo of me above and the photos on the site that were taken more recently.  Wow!