Today I am thankful for this: New experiences.  And they wouldn’t have been possible without the removal of toxic people from my life.  This isn’t just a silver lining.  Though brief, thanks to Covid and the lockdowns starting, for a short time I got to spend weekends in Seattle going to XFL games (I had season tickets, and will again when the XFL restarts) and out to clubs.

I wouldn’t have had the opportunities to go out and do these things when my life had toxicity.  I’d have been given too much hell, and the people mentioned yesterday would have done who-knows-what about me going out dancing.  Alone.  I love dancing and moving around, but there would have been hell to pay.

But instead I did have a time, no matter how brief, where I got to go out and just be me as me, not the mom-me, the wife-me, or the seamstress-me.  I got to find that, when I’m not trying to fit into a mold, I’m more social.  Maybe it’s not worrying about fitting some preconceived idea about how someone should be, no one telling me I need to tone down the glitter makeup since I “need to remember [I] have a kid” and such.  I can talk longer with random people in museums since I’m not ignoring whoever I’m with or at risk of boring them.  I can dance like no one’s watching while everyone’s watching.

These are things that I couldn’t have freely done before.  Even though they’re now in the past, for who knows how long or if we’ll ever really get them back, I at least got to have those experiences, and I’m thankful for that.