In the beginning

For those of you joining me from my main blog (abubbleoffcenter.blogspot.com), little introduction is needed. You already know FAR more about me than you’d ever hoped to know!

For those who are new and just joining me for this particular adventure, here’s what you need to know to catch up.

* Chronically, I’m old.
 Really, I am.

I can no longer console myself and pretend that I'm 'middle aged'.
I have neither the intention nor the will (not to mention - the money) to live to be 128!

* I’m retiring in the spring from a long career as a Social Worker in pediatric healthcare; the majority of that time spent working in the Intensive Care Unit and the Emergency Room with critically ill, often fatally injured and abused children.

I see the victims of sexual and physical abuse on a daily basis.
Essentially I have a job where people look me in the eyes every day and lie to me - to protect themselves, or their partners, from the consequences of their lousy decisions and actions.
This has gone on for decades.

*It’s taken a toll.
When you see evil everyday and people lie to you on a routine basis, even if you know it’s not personal (thanks to professional training and years of psychotherapy) the experience colors how you view the world, your place in it and other people.
It impacts your ability to trust.

*I’m not normal.
To quote my favorite author, Anne Lamott – My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.  
I’m extremely grateful for those family members and friends, who have accompanied me on a tour of the ‘hood' and who, for whatever reasons (or pathology) of their own, love outliers – me in particular.
My blog - A Bubble off Center – isn’t called that for nothing – it’s simply truth in advertising!

*I’m out of shape; well, not entirely, round is a shape too, I guess.
I’ve struggled since my teens with my weight and some years (okay, decades) have simply been better for self-care than others. The past decade - while dealing with work, a son deployed overseas, two jobs and a mother with Alzheimer’s dementia in a nursing home -  was not one of those better decades.
My weight wasn’t a series of skirmishes in an ongoing battle so much as waving the white flag of defeat and sinking with compatriots, Ben and Jerry, into the comfort of my couch.

I have absolutely no business thinking I can walk 550 miles from the foothills of the Pyrenees in France, across northern Spain to the coastal town of Cape Finisterre, which literally means the end of the earth.
None, nada, zip.
It’s crazy talk.
(However - see item above about not being normal)

*My plane ticket for France is paid for.
I’m retiring on March 15^th (Beware the Ides of March).
I’m leaving the Midwest on April 1, 2014.
The date was deliberately chosen - April Fool’s Day – since this may be the most foolish thing I’ve ever done.

*I’m big on symbolism