Perky Summer Camp Girl: "I'll be the victim!"
Wednesday Addams: "All your life..."
Addams Family Values

It's all about choices. Choosing your attitude. Choosing your battles.

It's all about accepting what you can't change and letting go of it. And taking what you can change and doing something about it.

I always arrive at this point someway, somehow. I need to play the victim role first, get the sympathetic hugs and then I move on.

Right now, my life is full of things I can't change. I can rail against the heavens until I turn blue in the face, it's not going to help. So I need to turn my back on those things and grab hold of what I can change and shake the stuffing out of it.

Half the battle is recognising what you can change. Especially when you are surrounded by things you desperately want to change but can't. Sometimes the recognition comes at strange times. I was responding to one of The Duchess' blogs about belly dancing, rhapsodising about how much I love it and how much fun it is. Then it occurred to me... when was the last time I danced?

How can I be happy if I'm not doing the things that I love? There is nothing stopping me doing it. I'm not injured, classes are available in my area. Why on earth am I not dancing?

In a similar vein, it has been a long, long while since I have done regular exercise.

And it shows.

I don't profess to love exercising, but I know how good it makes me feel. How good my body feels when it is flexible and strong. How good I feel emotionally with endorphins pumping through my system.

What on god's green earth is stopping me from doing that?

I had another shocking realisation recently. I went to Weight Watchers some time ago to teach myself how to eat. That may sound really strange but, due to a childhood well beyond my control, food stopped being a source of nutrition and became something else entirely.

I walked out of a particularly ugly client meeting two weeks ago and thought to myself, "Good girl. Now you can have a chocolate chip cookie."

I had slipped back into old habits. Old habits that MUST change.

I made a step in the right direction last night.

Red is the colour for danger. It's an alert, a warning. Stop! Danger! Go Away! In nature it means, "Back off, sunshine, I'm poisonous. I'm going to kill you."

I have a jacket in my closet. It's cut like a hunting jacket and has black velvet buttons and a black velvet collar. It is scarlet. Red, red, red, red, red. SERIOUSLY red. It's called my "Don't Fuck With Me" jacket. I wear it to client meetings when I need to maintain control. When I want to say, "Don't you mess with me. You're going to come off second best."

Guess what colour my hair became last night. [grin]

There are other things I will be working on over the coming weeks. The things I can control. Things I can change.

And it's about bloody time too.