I moved into my current apartment eight months ago and I initially had it neat as a pin, but then I got an influx of boxes and miscellaneous stuff as my ex cleared out the basement.

I would have been happy to have him just chuck the stuff – one box is marked “Wedding mementos” – if he doesn’t want that box, I certainly don’t!

But, now I have these boxes, and I feel compelled to go through them rather than just throwing everything out… Who knows? Maybe there’ll be something in a box that I really would like to keep.

But the task is a bit daunting, so days pass, and i don’t do it. Or, at least, I haven’t.

But the past couple of weeks, things in my life have been falling into place in a wonderful way.  I started working with my personal trainer, who is helping me move beyond just running and watching my nutritional habits better, and is motivating me to get my upper body and core toned.  She’s funny, and I really enjoy working with her.

And, in the past week, the to-be-ex and I met twice with our mediator and have finalized the issues surrounding our divorce settlement (money, house, belongings, retirement accounts, and most important – child custody arrangements), and we are now ready to file, and have this matter closed, which is a huge relief!  As I observed the first time around with divorce, it is way easier to get married than to get divorced – shouldn’t it be the other way around??  Especially when there are children involved…

There are things in my life that aren’t perfect (whose life is, for that matter?), but I feel happy right now, and I feel like the world and I are dancing in step with each other – it’s a glorious feeling.  I think, clinically, I’m probably experiencing hypomania, on the spectrum of mild cyclic mood disorder that I likely suffer from.  I don’t have full blown bipolar disorder, by any means, but “Cyclothymia” fits.

I know it won’t last – I will feel sadness again, I will feel anxiety again, I will feel anger and upset and that disturbing sense of being out of sync with the universe, but I’m hoping that by writing this, I at least have a snapshot of this experience to refer back to.  One thing that I always felt bad about when I would sit with my mother when she was going through one of her deep periods of depression, which she often described as feeling as if she were at the bottom of a very deep well, was that it was impossible to remind her that she had ever felt happy – she just couldn’t recover that memory of feeling anything but despair.

So, today, I dance…