The Devil I Know

"Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don't"

Last night I went to bed with this very heavy feeling in my heart. It was like a stone weight was placed on my chest. I couldn't get out from under this feeling for the longest time. I realized I am stuck in the past, yearning for something I was comfortable with because I am afraid of the future.

Is it age that makes me want to stay here rather than explore? I wonder. I spent so much of my life wanting to run away, to experience something different, to be anywhere but where I was. I even ended up here in RI because I goaded my first husband to look for work outside the state (well, I can't remember if I suggested outside the state, but I do remember trying to get him to find another job anywhere else).

And now I don't want to go anywhere, do anything differently. I want what I had, even though what I had, in retrospect, wasn't that great. It was becoming boring and dull, and I was selling more and more of myself to remain there. And yet that's what I keep yearning for.

Really? Well, my heart yearns, but my head knows better. My head knows that I am moving forward, even if it is in small increments. I am moving my career into a higher gear. I am eating better. I am being me more, and getting further away from being what someone else wants me to be.

That last point is so important. In spite of the fact that part of me wants to go back, there is a smart part of me that sees that I was repeating bad behaviors. When I take a good, hard look at the person I was with, I can see that he and my first husband shared some unhealthy characteristics, particularly the controlling behavior, which included the need to tell me what I was doing wrong (the way I walked, for example). More unsettling was the fact that I allowed it, and even more unsettling is that I want to go back to that. So I repeat – really?