Badass Tears

Sometimes being a blogger feels like being an Oscar winning actress. Drawing on a magenta lip-sticked smile and pretending everything is ok when it feels as though you are standing in a boxing ring taking one low emotional blow after another.
It doesn’t do you see to complain too frequently. People get to thinking you are a miserable old moo and wander off in search of cheerier pastures. But at it’s very heart, Brocantehome is about telling my truth, and to me that means not tricking you into thinking life is perfect twenty four seven, but instead acknowledging out loud when things are hurting too much to ignore.
Last week Mark told me something that forced me to re-live those sorry months shortly after he left. Eight years have passed since then, but his careless announcement knocked the stuffing out of me and left me failing, really rather dramatically to bite back the tears and say what any decent person would say in the circumstances. I have been crying, on and off ever since, in mourning for what isn’t and what will never be, and above all else cross, an emotion I cannot pull off with aplomb. And so here I am, a week later, still in somewhat silly shock. Cross and guilty. Numb and sleepy. Questioning everything. Doubting it all.
Last night, with my plans scuppered, I stayed in, eating an odd meal of Lancashire cheese on walnut bread with one perfect glass of Drappier Champagne. An extravagance in celebration of sorrow and exhaustion. The phone stayed quiet. The house creaked. And I lay in bed until the early hours learning how to be a badass when I rather felt like anything but. I mean really. A Badass. Even typing it makes me laugh. And though reading it felt like hanging out with my best friend, and each sentence made me giggle and wrote too many truths just under my goose-pimpled skin, never before have I chose to read a book so at odds with the state of my very own little nation. A book so necessary to helping me repair it.
I told you books will find you when you need them didn’t I?
Usually I would reassure myself that this too will pass. How many times have you heard me say that over the years? This too will pass. But here’s a little something that will not pass. A something I have to come to terms with in order to move on. That feels odd: to be faced with something that cannot be undone. A something that spells the end of an era. And the beginning of  a new, badass one. I have been too trusting you see. Too willing to believe in my own version of events. I have failed to be a badass and snoozed my way through any number of dozy ass years.
And now it is up to me to move on. Hold my hand won’t you?