I forgot that I had this blog, and stumbled across it once again in the fog of my brain, as reminder that I had once started this blog as an exploration of stilling the busyness and building my Buddha brain. As I turned to a space to reflect on my journey towards creating space again in my life, I found my way here again, a few years later. Once again, needing something that settled me outside of the pace of my job.

An intimate relationship that I deeply cared about ended not that long ago. Before I found myself in that recently ended relationship, it took me a long time to find myself in a place where I wanted to explore and date again. I entered into it hesitantly and found myself in a place where I was in the uncomfortable place of wanting more than what he wanted the relationship to be. I ended the relationship towards the end of December and I found myself floundering a bit on how to move forward, how to get to the place of wanting to date again. One of the things that I became aware of during an executive coaching session was that in the absence of that relationship, the demands of my job and the demands of being a single parent to a young adult with lots of complexity in their health was seeping into all the crevices of my life. I needed to find a way to carve out my life from my life.

As often happens in a powerful coaching session, it was a winding path to an emotional observation, followed by a flash of insight. At 54 years of age, once again single – as I have been for most of my adult life – I needed to find a way to date myself. In French – je me fréquente. I set myself the task to take myself on 50 first dates with myself before December 31, 2022. I recently heard a wonderful podcast with Carolyn Arnold who talked about 50 first dates after 50 and wrote a book about it. I was inspired and while I am still not ready to put myself out there to date, I am ready to carve out my life, find some joy and romance and playfulness with myself.

Writing about things helps me process and I’ve decided to begin once again with writing on this blog as I date myself over the next 43 weeks – see, I’ve already decided that I am awesome enough to date myself twice in a few of the weeks!!