The first blog post

Okay, so I'm brand new to this blogging thing, so please hang in there as I get accustomed to sharing my musings with the entire world.

Today, I had lunch with one of my best friends in the whole wide world. It's amazing how reconnecting with friends and family can be so therapeutic for the soul. Now, I do see this particular friend all of the time, but she traveled to see her family for Christmas, so when we got together today, we re-hashed about our Christmas holidays. Both of us are recently divorced, so this holiday was especially tough on us.

Now, here's the thing: it's these tough times -- the ones that really make you wonder what life is all about or why things happen the way they do or what on earth the future will bring for you -- that's when you can retreat and give in to the dark thoughts, or you can choose to find ways to pick yourself up by the boot straps. I've done both. And I realized that sometimes you need the darkness to find your boot straps. And sometimes, you just need friends to help you find the boot straps.

Today, as I was sitting at lunch with my friend, I realized that I do surround myself with people who choose to find the silver lining, even when the cloud is raining a massive sh!tstorm all over you. As we were recounting our Christmas stories at lunch today, we talked about the fact that when we were starting to feel sad that day, both of us chose to rely on our families to help us get through it all. We didn't wallow. We didn't feel sorry for ourselves. Instead, we kept our senses of humor about us. We remained positive. We let our families and friends support us by making us laugh. And today, we laughed some more. And it felt really, really good.