Snakes & Ladders & Roller Coaster Rides

I almost deleted yesterdays posts as it was all emotion and self indulgence but then I thought, No I wont because this blog has to be honest and sometimes during this process there is moments of raw emotion when your still trying to figure everything out and doing that is just as much about rebuilding as slapping up wallpaper is. If I wrote a blog/book that was all sunshine and flowers it would just be another DIY manual and thats not what this is all about at all. Its about getting over the heartbreak of loosing someone in whatever way it happens, of rebuilding yourself and rebuilding a life that has been changed when you didn't want it to be. My story is about doing that through property developing as a way of restoring self worth and a sense of positive achievement when everything else has felt like a massive failure. It is tough process, it is a roller coaster and once the house is rebuilt and I am rebuilt there will be a happy ending but right now its still a work in progress and sometimes I feel like I'm back to square one.
I'm not of course, I've come so far and when the dust settles (no pun intended) I see that but when I'm in the midst of confusion and pain again its important to acknowledge it's happening, to be real and honest on here. This weekend I felt the need to connect with someone who had been through something similar. You can feel so utterly alone, like the whole world is living a wonderful life without you and over a year on from my separation could I really drag it all up with friends again?
No, I needed to find some answers somehow to help me get back up because I was drowning, so I sat and re-read a blog that had inspired me. A lady who's partner had died suddenly of a heart attack and she had begun her blog after a year of hiding in her flat, sleeping, crying, drowning. I didn't know she had done that as I joined her blog some time down her line when she had progressed it into a new business that had become about her beautiful photography, posted when she had recovered enough to open her front door and venture out, a little further every day, camera in hand. I had never really read the beginning posts as what I needed from her then was her photography skill and although I mimiked her with my photography blog as a way of connecting with my Father and Grandmother who had just died I didn't feel the need to go back into her pain.
But that was just what I hoped to get from her this weekend in an attempt to not feel so utterly isolated inside Ambleside with the curtains firmly closed on what was the warmest sunniest day of the year so far. And that is what I am hoping one day to give others from my writing.
I have formed an opinion of her from her daily posts, an independent women, five years on from her heartbreak with two books in publication, a new home and a new search for love. Could this women who I admire and strive to emulate have ever been as lost, as insecure, as broken as I felt and would her blog hold some answers for me? I went back to her beginning. For the last two days I have read each heartbroken, soul searching post that she wrote back then. I have read her words on her bad days, her words on her good days when she felt she was recovering and her words on the days she slipped right back to the start again.
This heartbreak business is like a game of snakes and ladders and to see her climbing the ladders and sliding back down the snakes just like me was as comforting as having great big arms wrapped around me, arms that I haven't had for so long and that I miss so much. To see that she felt the same way I do after a whole year made me see that I wasn't going crazy, that I was just still grieving for the love I'd lost. Each set back opened up all the cracks in the plaster that I was trying so hard to fill, just as it had with her and it was such a relief to read someone else going through the same thing, just as confused, just as scared. Because she was brave enough to put her innermost raw feelings out there all those years ago, she helped me so much this weekend.
It was wonderful to read her slow recovery, to ride her lonely roller coaster with her to where she is now and to know that if she can do it, I will do it too. One day I will be in her shoes ready to face the world again and maybe one day someone will be reading my words and it will help them too. I will write and thank her for her honesty at that time and for not going back and deleting those posts.