Moving on to the good...

Poetry helped me dump my sad feelings when I was losing my hearing. So did smoking. I used to blow my negative feelings away in a puff of smoke. I stopped that eight years ago. Poetry is healthier.

To read my writing, you would think I’m a glass-half-empty kind of person. Really I’m not. My mother once said that I was born with rose-colored glasses on. It is kind of like “the tears of a clown, when there is no one around.” I can write about my sadness, resentment and anger, but if you walk into the room I’m in, I will smile and enjoy your company exuding happiness and well wishes.

I love people. I used to be a cosmetologist. Making people feel good with a new haircut, or fresh color was a joy. I had a lot of children customers because I was so patient with them, their parents would bring them back to me. When I started to miss conversation with the children and I would see confusion on their faces, it broke my heart. I came to realize that they had said something I missed. Often and typical of a child, when I asked them what they had said, they wouldn’t bother to repeat it. The last thing I wanted to do was make a child feel insignificant.

My time as a cosmetologist was brief, about three years. My main career was being a mother to our three daughters. I have made a lot of shifts in my life, trying to adjust to my hearing situation. The changes were always made with a positive attitude.

One of the things I have discovered by sharing what I have written, is that I’m not alone with my feelings. People have shared with me that I helped them to discover what they were feeling when they were having trouble putting a name to it. I don’t want to bring people down. I want to buoy them up and leave them feeling good. But sometimes we have to allow ourselves to feel our sadness or anger so we can move on to the good.