Christmas eve was a busy day - back & forth to church to setup for service, running a few much needed errands and traffic, traffic, traffic, all compounded by my illness and exhaustion.  Then yesterday I made some visits and saw my parents but faded out around dinner time and ended up going home to bed without making the annual trek to my uncle & aunt's house.  I was disappointed about that because I always look forward to that but I literally could not do it.  Driving home was a challenge for my tired eyes and exhausted mind.  I got home and got right in bed and watched VH1's top 100 songs of the 90s...but only made it to like 30 or so before I could not keep my eyes open any longer. 

 

The whole thing was a total flashback.  And my favorite of the whole night was seeing Hootie & the Blowfish - no, not because I am some big Hootie fan (they are ok but I don't think I own any of their CDs) but because Hootie's rise to stardom coincided with my conscious liberation from one controlling ex.  I spent a lot of time being agreeable with him - and that is not to say that we didn't like the same things because for the most part, we often did - but there were some things where my opinion was either wrong or just basically crazy in his opinion, and so I learned that it was best to be quiet about certain things.  So after one particularly upsetting fight/breakup/whatever (they blend together in my head now) I remember crying to my friend and saying, "Now I can admit it - I like Hootie and the Blowfish!  So there!!"  So seeing Hootie last night made me laugh and remember that feeling of liberation, of not caring if he knew or if he cared or whatever his comment on the subject might be...simply not caring.  Whoo hoo!  I know that I continued to date said boy off and on again for an interminable length of time but I always went back to the feeling of power I had in that moment and never let myself feel like my opinion was not to be shared.