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~ When life doesn't turn out as you had hope it would – It may not be 100% factual truth-but, it is 100% me.

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Tag Archives: Hopes

A New Year

05 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts

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Accomplishments, Attitude, change, Changes, Childhood, Choice, Choices, Confidence, Control, Courage, Creativity, Determination, Diet, Dreams, Empowerment, Exercise, Friendship, Goals, Growth, Healing, Health, Healthy, Healthy Eating, Healthy Habits, High School, hope, Hopes, Inspiration, Journey, life, losing weight, Mature Student, Me, Memories, Memory, Nostalgia, nutrition, perseverance, Progress, Reflection, Reflections, School, University, Victory, Weight Loss, Writing

I know I have been extremely slack in writing. This will be no surprise to anyone who was followed or known me for any length of time. I have a history of writing faithfully for bursts of time, followed by not writing for a length of time, only to pick it up and start again. On and on the cycle goes.

The main reason for this is that there are many, many, many things I want to write about that involve other people and I am not quite ready to put the stories that include other people (even if I withhold names) out there just yet. But, that doesn’t mean the writing isn’t happening. I still have to go through the process of writing about what’s in my mind. I just can’t share it yet.

These stories invade my mind and I still have to allow myself the time to go through them and let the stories work themselves out before I can move on to something else.

This often includes a process of revisiting the past and sometimes even reaching-out to a long, lost, friend or just trying to come to terms with how an old relationship ended.

There has been a lot of this for me in the past 6 months as our move back home has brought-up many memories and experiences with which I still needed to process and come to terms.

I have also become a full-time university student, via distance ed., working towards a degree. This has been a dream of mine ever since I left High School, when depression and anxiety held me back from being able to attend university. It has been something I had always missed-out on and, being someone who loves school and loves to learn, had always dreamed I would be able to do.

Now I’m doing it and it feels great!

I am also continually improving my health and nutrition and constantly striving to treat myself well.

I feel great.

2018 is going to be a good year.

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The Decision to Move

22 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts, Seeking Life Now

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Cancer, change, Changes, Choices, Courage, Family, Fear, Home, Hopes, Journey, life, Life Lessons, Loss, Love, Mourning, Moving, Pain, Reality, Reflections, Sepsis, Toronto, Truth

When my Mom phoned to let me know she had called an ambulance to bring my stepdad to the hospital, it was as if the world around me grew still, despite the fact that I was standing in the middle of a bustling Nathan Phillip’s Square in downtown Toronto at the very first Winter Festival being held there.

My husband, child and in-laws kept walking and I could see them pointing towards the ice skaters and, more excitedly, towards the Zamboni. But, my heart had sunk to my shoes and tears were streaming down my cheeks.

I didn’t want to spoil their moment, but I was feeling desperate. I just wanted to get away and be somewhere I could have a good cry. But, I didn’t want to scare my son.

I hung-up with my Mother and eventually rejoined my family. I explained what was going on to my husband while his parents entertained the kid. My gut instinct was to get in a plane and go be with my parents. However, this was very much complicated by the fact that our in-laws had flown all the way from New Zealand to be with us, we didn’t have any other vacation days (so I’d have to take a pay-loss), we were broke so I would have to borrow the money to go as it was, I and I have a 3-year old that I had to consider.

My husband calmed me and told me to just wait to hear some more news about what was going-on before I panicked too much.

It wasn’t until recently, when we moved-back to be with my parents, that I learned just how dire the situation was and just how terrified my parents had been. These are difficult things to convey over text or phone calls, I suppose.

When talking to my Mom in that week and a half, I was trying to discern from what she said and how she sounded whether, or not, they really needed me there.

After getting off the phone with her one evening I broke-down. When my husband came to see what was happening I sobbed “I hate feeling like I am waiting to get that nightmare call that we had better come now or it will be too late…”

My Stepdad had gone through 11 rounds of chemo for colon cancer, and this was the year after he had been flown to Ottawa for a triple bypass. Now, he was in hospital with sepsis and my Mother had said that they were struggling to keep his organs functioning.

I knew it was serious, but did not know how serious or how scared both of my parents were going-through this. I guess that’s a compliment to how well they handled it together. Still, I hate thinking that they had to go through it alone.

Once my Stepdad was out of the hospital, I said to my husband, through more sobbing one night: “I NEVER want to be in that position again. Having to ask my Mom to let me know when it got to the ‘you need to come now because he’s dying’ stage.”

I hated being in that position. I didn’t wan to wait until it was too late. I wanted to spend time with him while there was still time to spend. I wanted my son to be able to build memories of his grandparents of playing games, laughing over dinner, sharing ice cream treats and going for car rides and not just sitting in a hospital saying ‘goodbye’.

So, we made the decision to uproot our lives, and move home.

It was a decision that required a lot of sacrifice, and there are times I still can burst into tears when something I miss about our old home strikes or when my Son asks something like: “Can we go to the tick-tock park?” (A park we used to frequent behind city hall, where the large clock on old city hall, would chime on the hour).

But, the pain and the loss we experience over leaving the city that we all dearly loved pales in comparison to the pain and the loss we would feel if we had decided to stay and, instead, forfeited the time we now get to spend with family.

You just cannot put a price on that.

People say it all the time, but until you are staring it in the face it can be tough to comprehend;

life is short.

You have to look at what really matters to you and be prepared to move heaven and earth to make it happen.

It may be very difficult at times when we are missing our beloved city, but that is grief, not regret. I will never regret choosing time with my family over our life in the city.

We never know how much more time we have together. I’m determined to make the most of it.

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Seeking New Daydreams

08 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts, Seeking Life Now

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Adulthood, Daydreams, Hopes, Imagination, life, Pretending, Writing

When I was younger I spent the bulk of my time lost in daydreams. There was a steady stream of stories and scenarios swirling-around inside of me. These thoughts did not feel detached from me, as I lived through every one with full emotion and feeling.I would have numerous conversations and encounters with crushes as well as heated debates (which I always won) with adversaries on important topics such as LBTQ rights or the plight of small/family-run farms.

I have lost some of this, which I suppose is a good thing since I’m not sure how I would have been able to make it in the world as an adult if I continued to spend all my time lost in my imagination. But, I miss the feelings that these reveries brought with them. My life held so much magic to it back then.

I have been attempting to try and regain some of this magic while keeping a foot solidly in the land of adult responsibilities and duties.

I am trying to be intentional about stopping to soak-in some moments in time. Today, as my son was using the toilet, I stood at the bathroom window while the breeze caused the soft white curtains to dance around me, and stared at the backyard. I tried to memorize each tree, how they looked, how they responded to the wind and took a deep breath to try and memorize the smell of the moment.

The things that are missing from these moments, however, are the questions of who I will be, what I will be doing, who I might be with, and what of my hopes and dreams might I have already fulfilled. Many of these questions have now been answered. The excitement of the unknown, mostly when it comes to the romantic things, has passed.

Truthfully, most of my daydreams were about romance. I liked to imagine a million scenarios that could happen between me and whichever person I had feelings for at the time. It was a fun world in which to live, but one that doesn’t really exist as a married person anymore.

The truth is, I love to imagine and I love to pretend. I do, sometimes, play-out imaginary scenarios of what life might be like if I were married to another person. I will picture us in a house, doing married-life things, just as my husband and I do now, and see how it plays itself out. But, these daydreams are difficult to maintain as I always have to, inevitably, face the question about what the imaginings mean for my husband and child. The old carefree dreams of this romantic are now hopelessly real and complicated.

I miss the nervous thrill of never knowing ‘if it will ever happen’.

It happened.

That’s done.

As a result, I have been starting to dig into my mind and try to find other unknowns, other questions and things that make me feel a similar kind of enjoyable anxiety towards. I want to make some more space for daydreaming again and living here gives me the perfect opportunity to do so.

Now, I just have to find some new daydreams.

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It’s My Story – And, I love it.

03 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts, Seeking Life Now

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Changes, Childhood, Home, Hopes, Inspiration, life, Life Change, Life Lessons, Looking Back, Me, Memories, Memory, Moving, Moving Forward, Reflections

It’s always exciting to me when a chapter of my life is drawing to an end. The older I get, the more I am able to look-back on each chapter with pride and contentment. Perhaps this is because so much of my early chapters were filled with struggle, heartache and pain and as I get further away from them, filling my book with more adventures and happy moments, there are simply more memories from which to choose than there once was.
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I am also more excited than I used to be at the start of a new chapter. When I was younger, so much of my life was a blank page and I didn’t understand or fully appreciate the wonder of that.
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I recall when I was in my early 20’s, reflecting on my life and waiting for it to begin. In my mid-20’s, thinking I had experienced so much and yet, still thinking that I was still just waiting for when life would really start for me. At that time, I had only lived a small handful of chapters.
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Even though I somehow, at least on an intellectual level, knew that this was life, that it had begun, I didn’t feel it and I was still waiting.
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I used to meditate on the idea and try to will my whole being to a great epiphany of in-the-moment realization that this was life and it was wondrous. Then, one day, without me even noticing, it just happened.
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I can look-back on so much of my life and see these clear chapters, separations, moments of endings and new beginnings, of loss, of gain, of growth of retreat.
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And it’s all glorious.
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Now, more than when I was young, I revel at those blank pages. I am excited to think what stories, adventures, sites, smells, sounds and memories are going to fill these pages. I have a deeper appreciation for what it means to really be able to “look-back” and reflect on things.
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Natasha Bedingfield sings a song called “Unwritten” that has just started playing in my head as I am writing this:
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Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten.
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One day, years from now, I will be looking-back on this new chapter after it has been finished and I have moved-on to a new one, maybe even several new ones, and I will see the flashes of happy Christmases, sorrows and loss, moments of silliness, mistakes made, feelings of pride as well as accomplishment and, what I’m most looking-forward to, memories that are, heavily, steeped in love.
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I will be changed then, as I am now from the 20 year old me that was so eager for life to start.
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But, one thing will always remain – this is my story.
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And, I love it.
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Starting over…over and over again.

18 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts, Seeking Life Now

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Dreams, Expectations, Hopes, life, Reality, Starting over

*

I have always loved to write.

When I was young I would write long, elaborate, humorous stories and my friends would gather around during recess and ask me to read them out loud. I lived for English class, enjoyed writing essays and loathed the dreaded “100 words or less” type of assignments.

I dreamed about being many things when I was young: teacher, musician, missionary, voice of a Disney character, fashion designer, photographer, lawyer, therapist, personal driver, forest ranger, big rig driver…but, the one dream that never changed or went away was the idea that I would write.

I have started and stopped blogs, oh, about a million times it seems.

The thing that often stops me is this idea that everything and anything can already be found on the internet.

The internet doesn’t need another voice clogging-up its waves (or whatever it is that keeps things ticking-along behind the scenes).

I felt powerless. Voiceless.

There was nothing I had to say that would add any value or relevance to the magnitude of words already out there.

And then, just suddenly, while sitting at work one day (years after my last attempt at a blog post) it all made sense…

The world may not need any more thoughts expressed in words. But, I needed to write.

I feel lost, less myself, when I am not writing. And, as often happens with these massive life lessons, my Mother told me this long before I realized it for myself.

So, thanks, Mom. I got there eventually.

This time I hope to stick with it because, actually, I feel like I have a lot to say now.

And, who knows, if you come along for the journey, we might discover together that I did have something to contribute after all.

So, welcome back Me.

It’s been far too long (again).

*

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