A short reflection while waiting on the train

So, the trip is half over.  Tallin and Helsinki have been toured...it's the morning that we are leaving for St. Petersburg and I have an hour to stop and think and reflect and consider this "journey to" that I wrote about last week.

(I'm having an amazing time, btw.  Tallin is a magical city.  I want to move there I think...gotta figure out how to get JBW set up in Estonia!)

Anyway, the journey to the new me:

Things  I know to be true:  I'm more relaxed while traveling than ever before, I'm confident, I like being with people, and I like being by myself.  While i know that home is something I'll get back to I've hardly given it a thought.  Even the kitties who I know are safe and secure and well cared for.

While some of these observations may not seem surprising, they are for me.  In my relationship with the ex I always took on the emotional burdens.  If he was stressed, I acted it out.  If he was angry, I acted it out...you get the picture.  I find that being me by myself is pretty nice.  I'm not having to worry about his behaviors, I'm not acting out his discomfort and I'm not filtering his social faux pas.  It's been amazing, to just go and see and not judge.  Amazing.

Things that surprised me: you remember that beauty that I knew I'd have to find in all of this mess..the divorce and quitting my job and moving across the country and settling into my new life?    You remember that I knew there was beauty there and that I would have to keep searching for it because I didn't want to become bitter and awful and ugly during this whole process.

Well...I found it...and it's right here...in me...I'm beautiful. Inside and out.  In all ways.  And it makes me so profoundly happy that I've comes to tears several times on this trip.  This beauty thing has always been something difficult for me to accept about myself.  Mom used to tell me that I was so pretty and I'd respond that she had to think that because she was my mom...that she thought it didn't make it real.  David used to tell me...but for reasons I'm slowly uncovering I never believed it from him either.

The truth of that is that I wasn't ready to see it.  I didn't have the strength to own my beauty and know that it could be appreciated by others and they not use it for their own purposes.  I denied the beauty in order to protect myself.

I've worked hard to discover beauty this year.  I found it in a place I wasn't expecting.  I fully expected that I would see art, or architecture or history that would bring to the forefront that beauty...and I could learn to create that in my own version of art...I didn't, honestly, expect to find it quite so close to home (so to speak).

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So this morning I will head out to see a city that I've always wanted to go to.  Where all kinds of things collide and in a culture and history that I know little about but still feel connected to in some way.  I'm excited because I believe that this second part of my journey will bring me even closer to the beauty within me.  Through the experiences coming up over the next 4 days I'll learn to appreciate and things about myself that I've always struggled with.

Beauty.  It's empowering.