I\’ve never tried blogging before but a good friend of mine has one and I love reading it……. she never seems to blog enough!

I think I\’ve finally sold my house, my cave in the woods as my docs call it and I\’ll be moving to a big city……. big according to me anyway!  There\’s aThoreau quote I love, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."   When I moved to my house in the woods I thought I could live life entirely independent of others and what I\’ve found, from living here a bit over three years was that I need people and I miss people and living alone with OCD is not living and definitely not confronting life.

So when I move I\’ll call my years in Maine my respite.  It was my time to draw from my inner strength to combat those fears that would never back down.  I\’ll be moving closer to a good CBT therapist so I can really regain my life.  I\’m 42 now, on disability since I was 22 and I want to live intensely and work and contribute and fight.  I want to have fun!  I don\’t know that this move will bring all those wonderful things to my life but it will open another chapter.  It will keep me from hiding.  Living will mean moving out of the woods. 

I moved to Maine not knowing another soul and not wanting to either.   But I still came to care about others and I came to miss things that I had dreamed of enjoying.  Long walks in the autumn colored woods could not fill my desire to walk in art museums admiring the works of the Great Masters.  Forty below wind chills in the winter and hoards of biting black flies in the spring and summer kept me for living out my dreams but they were mere excuses.  In reality it has been anxiety and fear that have kept me from living. 

So now a new chapter begins.  Hiding from the things I feared did nothing for me…… I did not gain a sense of peace and solitude.  I want too much to share the joys and laughter of life with others…… the same people I am terrified to be near.  But I\’m going to do it.  I\’m going to have the support and the friends and I\’m starting over again.

This life is MINE and the OCD had just better back off because I want to live too much!