Dedication

Today's post is a dedication more than anything else. 
A personal blog post, that I am willing to open up and share.

23 years ago today I was 17, and numb.
I had been told that my 19 year old boyfriend had been killed in a car accident, only hours after dropping me home. 3am on Saturday 16th September 1989. The crash claimed 2 best friends, and seriously injured 2 more, and the lives of many were changed forever.

After the initial shock, when the numbness wore off and the pain set in, and after the funeral,  I shut down - emotionally. I didn't know how to cope, and I almost checked out myself to try to escape the pain. 

When everyone else appeared to carry on with life, I was walking around with a big hole inside, and I see now that I tried to fill that hole with food.
As painful as that was, for many, many years, I now see how that losing Rob, and finding ways to survive, led me to spirituality, opened my soul up bare and raw, and molded me into the person I am today. 
So after 23 years I have learned to be grateful for that experience, bizarrely grateful for losing him. Because, you know what, I now know that I can survive.  There are other things I have survived, and no doubt more that I will in the future, but today on the Anniversary, I am grateful for having known him, having loved him, and having lost him. 
For years, September 16th made me cry, and now it makes me smile, I never ever thought I would say that, and be at peace with it.

a few weeks before the crash

So on this day, a day that passes every year and I think of Rob, it is opportune for today to be the day that I decide, I promise myself, to learn other ways to cope with pain, and stress.  Get back to meditation, which helped me in the early years, and I have not had time for lately. To write more, journaling/blogging to get it out, before it festers and I need to eat... to move on and start dealing with the other traumas of the past that caused me to get to 100kg, to once and for all allow myself to really 'feel' and not anaesthetise my emotions.

To Rob's family, wherever you are, I'm thinking of you