The last entry

What do you really, really really want today?

It’s been almost one year since I last reviewed my needs and wants.
Lots have happened since.

I returned from my yearlong journey in London with a broken heart and a broken spirit. I went to find myself professionally, hoping this would somehow infuse my emotional state, I came back in a thousand little pieces, and was then forced to put my puzzle together without a friend, love, money, car… or any other mundane tool. All I had was me- in pieces, but it was still me.

I tried going back to school, but somehow I was so hungry for knowledge, the school didn’t satisfy me enough. I started to pick up the little pieces and organize them neatly into piles. I figured I needed to assess the damage before I could do anything. I dreaded coming back to my home, I hang around my friend’s store, sleeping on a mattress on the floor for a week before finally gathering my courage and suitcases back here.

The instant I walked in I felt it… wanting to agree or not, I was home. This is actually a very new feeling, something I had never experienced before. Having left HOME when I was 13 to move to the USA, then leaving HOME again, to go to Brazil, and then leaving that home again to find a new HOME in London… I actually had not had a HOME in more than 25 years. My pictures, my books, my furniture… mine, my family’s house, where my father grew up, where my first days as a newborn baby was spent, the staircase with the 1970's blue tiles and wood that I walked my first steps as human being. The dining room where my mother and grandmother spent many afternoons smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and chatting the day away. The kitchen where my grandmother prepared my birthday parties, the pantry where she would hide chocolate in very low places so I could find. The bedroom with the closets my grandfather built that would hold presents for me for all occasions. This was HOME.

I started by putting the place in order, throwing away old broken things, cleaning like a mad woman. Little did I know I was cleaning metaphorically.
During my long days of cleaning my mind and heart were mending and organizing themselves so I could soon reach in and build myself up again. Having been hit with a bit of depression, I became restless, I would spend two or three days without sleeping, just tossing and turning in my bed, so one day I decided it was time to see the mess in my mind.

I started a blog, having never been good at writing a diary, I thought this would help me emotionally to air things out. As any novice want- to- be writer I started at the beginning, trying to figure out from the bottom what was happening to me. I research political information about the 70’s and 80’s to try to explain why my family had decided to “up and away to the US of A”, I blamed our dictatorship of past decades and dollar oscillations in the 80’s. I looked for every reason except the real one.
The only truth to any of this is that you can’t start at the begging, the truth is the begging is so far down you cant get to it unless you deal with the stuff on top first!

It’s like trying to read that one phrase, from that one book at the bottom of a cardboard box, filled with other books and papers on top. The only way you will reach that book is if you can take out all the rest of the stuff from the top first. Now, there are two ways you can do this… If you choose to, you can just simply flip the box upside down and dump all the stuff on the floor, and then try amidst that mess find the “one” book you are looking for. Having to then, organize all the rest later or just leave it there until you need something else again. Or the more tedious, time consuming, mind boggling thing to do is to slowly unpack the box, organize the books you are already removing, replacing them o shelves until you finally reach the “one” book.

This was one enormous task! I have always been hyperactive, and my focus orientation is to always be focused on “something else”, so you can imagine the effort I had to put in to myself to get the task done.

I started by revising my year in London, the friendships I made, the troubles I got into. The ideal love I lost, that brought me to my least favorite relationship, before I left Brazil, therefore bringing me to my five year relationship before I left the USA, and I realized, I’d been doing it all wrong! Even though I always said before loving you must love yourself, no one can give you what they don’t have, blah, blah, blah…I had fallen into that trap of waiting fro someone to fix me, pick me up, and glue me together, save me from myself, make me better, I had been waiting for someone to find that odd little coal and polish it in a perfect diamond.



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I spent a lot of time on my own, and that was very, very new. I am the one that never turns down a party, a chat on the phone, a movie or dinner. Party girl, always up for anything, but I guess in a sense I was already in a party… melancholic to say the least, but a party nonetheless.

I reviewed blames I sat aside for my father, and confronted the demons of childhood. I decided that I had to be responsible for my action, and I could no longer blame him for his shortcomings. I had to know what they were, and make sure I understood that from a certain time in my life he was not responsible, because there were no “victims”. I had to accept that event when I chose not to make I choice I was still making a choice of not choosing; there fore I was the only one responsible. I started eating books, drinking the nectar of knowledge, everything and anything, from lovely fairy tales, to Balzac’s interpretation of a woman, put forth in such a beautiful way in a moment very valuable for me as I was just turning 30 myself. I read self-help books, and magazines; I watched soap operas and analyzed myself. I clichéd myself to death, and began to see my life unfolding right before my minds eye.

It turns out Balzac was right. A woman of 30, is old. She is not willing to let anything or anyone come between her and herself any longer, she is not malleable, she is only flexible to herself, and only when she chooses to be.
This is the woman I became. I learned myself, I became me, together with myself I can now act as one. My mind is where it needs to be, and I am happy.

So what do I really, really, really want?
Never to loose myself again!





* I dedicate this to my eternal Balzac's Woman- my wondermoman! My hero, Mom