Walking a Tightrope 

Sometimes it feels like walking a tight rope, my arms outstretched, focused eyes, fluid balance as I teeter over the sea of life and roars that threaten defeat.
Like the little engine that could, I feel rather than hear the voice chanting, "I can do this, I can do this, Im gonna be ok" Then the lightest wind or most random detail sends me spiraling.... The bill from the electric company sat on my desk in the living room, unopened for days.
I finally picked it up, as casually as I could hoping I wouldn't notice my own terror, and threw it in my purse because opening it in my car felt safer. I would be in broad daylight, afterall. The amount of energy I had spent avoiding it and thinking about it was truly astonishing.  
I see now, it wasnt the bill itself that frightened me as much as what I saw it representing. YOU ARE ALONE. It screamed at me. "Figure out your life, your career and your goals, and do it in the next 2 minutes because the train is coming. And your old.
By the way, that 401K aka a husband, is history. The past ten years that you were dedicating to a house that you dont live in and outgrew five years ago, smarter women were building a sense of self, stupid." AND throw a couple kids in there to take care of, with no child support or alimony. I TOTALLY pictured myself homeless. Heres the funny thing, other people who knew me, I mean the ones who actually saw the side of me that I missed, were truly puzzled by my fears, they saw a competent, smart, strong woman.
I called those people constantly, like an attention starved dog. It didnt help that I chose a career in sales, strictly commission, because I am capable but possibly unemployable, so I had nothing to budget at all in the beginning. It was like doing algebra on acid.
Nothing equals less. Or something like that.   It's amazing how low self esteem can actually go. I remember opening the bill, and like the stuffed snakes jumping out of the magicians hat, most of my worst fears, havent really happened. They've been duds. Smoke and mirrors.
But what has been building simutaneously, is solid. Each time I get through one of these hoops of fire, I am more resilient, more confident, more aware. We learn to walk again in divorce. Like it or not, two became one. And if that one is myself, at least we should get along...