At the beginning of last summer, I was supposed to be taking over the store I worked at. I was supposed to become the manager and get a substantial raise. If you'd asked me there where I'd be in a year, I'd have said in the same town, with the same people, and possibly starting to organize a move to another continent.

So what happened? Well, the store got shut down because of the economy--and shutting down a retail store full of merchandise and ten years of debris is no easy task, even spread over two months. I decided to go back to school--which meant moving to my old hometown 80 miles away, which meant finding a house there, organizing moving, doing all the paperwork to get back into school, packing, dealing with leaving the people I'd spent the last two years seeing every day, transferring my waitressing job to a new location, etc. And then I had sinus surgery about two days before I was out of a job, so that was all that and a bag of Vicodin--surgery coordination, insurance potentially not covering it, surgery being eighty miles away, and where to recover, and what about my pets, and guilt over not being there the last couple of days for my store, and .. and ... yeah.

And oh yeah, I got dumped (Kind of. Very confusing. Long story.). And I was sad about about it, and I didn't like it, but I also didn't have the sort of panic attacks I've been having the last week--thinking I can't live without him, thinking I don't want to live without him, thinking I miss him terribly, torturing myself thinking of him so much as touching another woman, hating myself and wondering what I can do to fix it, going back and forth between being desperate for him and feeling normal. I've felt like I'm losing my goddamn mind. It was hard to believe I'd be okay when it seemed like there was no reason for this sudden onslaught of pain.

And I finally realized ... I think it's a delayed reaction. Delayed by a long, long time--like seven months--because there was just too much other crap going on for me to cope with. I'm see-sawing less the last day or too; I still miss him terribly, and if I could wave a magic wand and fix everything I'd be with him now. But realizing what's going on, rather than just feeling like I'm headed for a straightjacket, makes me feel better.