Passion...

I was laying in bed and my thoughts and feelings were finally materializing out of the crazy fog in my brain... Something has been upsetting me lately... Perhaps, I should say THINGS have been bothering me lately and I haven't quite known how to put them into words until now. And even now, I'm not sure how this will all come out....

So, passion. Passion to me is so many things. It can be worse than an addiction; leaving you with cravings that you can't shake unless you are able to act freely upon your instincts. Passion is both in the heat of the moment and the slow-burning embers of everyday life... It is what makes a person feel alive and beautiful and free and swaddled all at the same time. Passion makes everything sweeter, for it is the sugar in your tea and within your deepest convictions.

Basically, I'm feeling like I am going through life lately, with no passion. I don't know where it went and I don't know who I am without it. Each day, I live my life within the walls of my home. I do what is required of me as a mother and wife by keeping the house clean and cooking and paying bills, all the necessary, but mundane parts of life. All the while, I keep getting the same nagging feeling I have been getting since I left high school. That is, that I am not living up to my full potential... Besides not going to college or being amidst a career at this point, I don't have much of a social outlet.

This lifestyle leaves me to count mostly on my husband to feed my social needs. Sometimes, I would really love to trade sleeping in late and taking care of our kid just to get up early in the mourning and go off to work where I could have someone to talk to all day, something else to stimulate my mind...

It's unrealistic to expect my husband to be capable of completely satisfying my social needs... But lately, I'm wondering if he satisfies them at all... Generally, the first thing he does when he gets home is tell me how HIS day went. Which is something I really care about, but when he doesn't bother asking about mine, it just further nails in the fact that I really don't have much of a life to talk about in the first place...

Enclosed within these walls, it becomes more difficult by the day to become inspired. Life is becoming really predictable. Inspirations lead to the greatest of passion! But it escapes me...

These are my young years. These are the years of my life when I'm supposed to be the most beautiful, have the most sex and enjoy life the most, for my youth and health are in-tact. I am beautiful now and worthy of passion in my life.

But instead, I sit here and brood about all these things inside that are bothering me about a lot of different aspects of my life. Analyzing and over-analyzing and then feeling like a huge complaining whiny asshole... This is not good for my marriage, it's not good for my soul... It's not the person I want to be.

I know I am responsible for taking this problem into my own hands, for seizing the day and that I will be the only one to blame if life passes me by while I'm complaining about it. I am going to a meeting on Tuesday to see about Financial Aid and the process of signing up to take college courses to keep me busy for the next year while my husband deploys again. Will that be enough?

Moving deeper, to more difficult issues, I just feel like I am losing my own identity and that we are loosing who we are as a couple. It's like I've forgotten who I am as a person besides being my child's mother and my husband's wife. I am forgetting what it's like to be alone with my husband. We hardly spend any time alone. The time when we dated each other has become such a distant cluster of memories in the back of my mind...

And I have changed as a person since he's been gone repeatedly for longer periods of time than any couple should have to endure. As I've changed, I realize lately that my standards and expectations are changing. The way I want to be talked to, touched and communicated with, is different these days; more appropriate for a woman my age...

I like my hair to be black, it's what makes me feel like myself and I guess, he doesn't understand that, he only sees the girl with the brown hair that he first met. She was only 15 and I've come a long ways since then, gained a nose piercing, a bunch of tattoos and grown into my skin, become more myself while being the same person I've always been. He's changed too and become someone I love and dislike all at the same time.

So here again, another part of my life is in dire need of passion. I thought women started complaining of this when they reached their 40's, not now, not while I'm this young woman, still on the verge of the rest of her life....

Something stark, stabbing, painful and true was written to me in a message from a friend of mine that has remained in my mind ever since...

She said that the small amount of time that our men are actually home with us should be the most passionate of times to remind us of why we are sticking around in the first place, waiting for them to come home....

I know all of this seems incredibly negative. It is. These are my mind's thoughts lately. They are just a few of my deepest feelings that have had me all dull lately. I am without my shine....

It doesn't mean that I am completely unhappy. I hate sounding like the woman who is impossible to please, the one who complains about everything. This is my outlet....