Kiss me, I'm liberated

(A-Z Challenge: K *and* L) 

A few years ago I found myself needing to start over in some pretty major ways. My husband and I had just separated and everything was in flux, from the big overarching life things like finding my own apartment  and working out a schedule for the kids, to small things like realizing mid-egg cooking that I need a spatula.

Also, I was broke. I spent a lot of time at Goodwill and on Craigslist gathering what I needed piece by piece. Hand-me-down dishes from a friend's divorce, an old vacuum cleaner that had been sitting in another friend's storage shed for 3 years. A knife set and a set of bunk beds for the kids from Craigslist and this coffee mug from Goodwill. 

I latched on to this mug because I was trying hard to keep the fleeting moments of elation I felt about having a place that was mine. I was desperately trying to frame it as liberation in order to escape the heavy despair I was feeling underneath it all. It wasn't that my life was all shaken up, nope. This was liberation, baby!

Now that I've got a few years buffer from that period in my life, I periodically feel tempted to release that mug back into the Goodwill sea. But it's taken on a new meaning for me now, with new reminders:

1. Liberation is a state of mind. We can liberate ourselves from a situation but that doesn't mean we've liberated ourselves from the pattens that got us there in the first place. 

2. We never know how resourceful we are until the moment we need to find out.

3. Sometimes we need to act on instinct before we fully understand why. And that hindsight can take years. Act anyway.

4. We can create what we want, regardless of who's doing what. I wanted a feeling of a peaceful household. I was demanding someone close to me to just be predictable and peaceful, dammit, so I could experience peace. Remove that "someone else" and I had to step up and create that peace I wanted to experience. I needed to be alone to figure out how to do that internally before I could bring that into a household with more people. I'm still working on it, but from a different starting point. 

5. As long as our sense of freedom and liberation depends on another person behaving in a particular way, good luck to us, because they won't cooperate. They can't. They're who they are, not puppets in our personal life theater. (I hate it when I have to remember this, because it usually comes after a period of serious frustration. Still learning!)

I don't know if true liberation is achievable unless you're an enlightened being, but we can keep liberating ourselves in small ways, preferably over a good cup of coffee.