As I look back on my life over the past decade, I don’t recognize the woman I was 10 years ago: scared, unconscious, trapped. The past decade contained a series of events and mini-awakenings that have led me here. I know I am not fully conscious … yet. But unlike 10 years ago, I can imagine the fulfilled, happy, awakened woman I will be at the turn of the next decade. In an exercise that is almost purely selfish, in the next several posts I’ll be taking a snapshot-heavy look back and where I was each year during the past 10 years, and what my major achievements and losses were. It’s the losses, I believe, that move us forward the most.

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004-1, 2004-2, 2004-3, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

The first year of my separation and divorce had flown by so quickly. As the anniversary of the date my ex left me approached, I did everything I could to distract myself. Bad Boyfriend Joe helped me along that path, drugging me with sex and booze. He was shifty, never quite looking me in the eye, sometimes disappearing and leaving me anxious. I thought I was in love with him.

January

Laurel & me at my house blessing

In January, I held a house blessing party. I hired a shaman to smudge the house and remove all lingering energy from all the corners. When my closest friends arrived, we walked from room to room, lighting candles and blessing the space. Soon all of the guests arrived, each bringing a small token for the blessing altar I was setting up on my sideboard. My birthmother sent blessed sea salt from Maui, which I sprinkled along the doorways to keep out evil spirits. My friend Wendy gave me origami cranes. Everyone contributed to the Lynn’s New Stove fund. The party was immensely entertaining, and touching. My parents came, surprising me with some of the tenderest words I’d ever heard them say about me. My friend Jenny brought her newborn daughter, and we passed her around so people could rub her fuzzy head for good luck. At the end of the evening, My friend Helen’s now-ex pulled out my guitar and started playing. We were all drunk, but Joe was especially so, and he kept us laughing with blues riffs sung to Michael’s excellent guitar playing.

February

I continued to spend money I didn’t have. By February, I was asking Joe to contribute to the grocery and booze fund, since he was drinking my liquor cabinet empty every week and spending most of his time at my house. I volunteered for a charity Mardi Gras party, sitting on the decorations committee. When the party came around, Joe was my date. We were both wasted on hurricanes. I wore a beautiful turquoise ballgown I’d bought on sale at Jessica McClintock. He kept me laughing until he started embarrassing me with his loud stories and inappropriate use of the English language–everything was a ‘harbinger’ to him. I felt responsible not only for his behavior but for his idiocy. And yet, I clung to him.

Me and Laurel, Mardi Gras 2005

I don’t remember feeling depressed that year, probably because if I was home and Lauren was with her dad, I was intoxicated.

I continued to take salsa lessons and go dancing once or twice a week. I ate as cleanly as possible to make up for the liquid calories I was taking in. I went to the gym, somehow motivating myself to do an hour of cardio plus an hour of lifting five or six days a week. I felt strong and sexy, desirable. Yet something was off. I was not happy.

Lauren came and went. When she was with me, we watched a lot of videos–Sleeping Beauty and Mary Poppins were her favorites. Her dad started dating a girl, who he introduced Lauren to right away. We fought about that. She had met Joe a couple of times, but he had never stayed over when she was with me. My ex’s girlfriend frequently slept over when Lauren was with him. We fought over how inappropriate it was. He’d call me and yell at me over the stupidest things; the conversations would end up with him threatening to fight me for custody, to stop paying my alimony and child support … and with me crying.

I decided the only way to keep him at bay was to communicate only through IM and email. That helped a bit. But I felt so terrified that he would go to court, that  I acquiesced to his every demand. I still believed that he was right: I was a terrible, selfish mother. He punished me by belittling me, making me ask for my checks every month, complaining about how poor he was as he traveled to the Caribbean, Mexico, and other places. He bought a second car “for fun”–a convertible BMW coupe–and rubbed it in my face as he complained about writing my child support check. When he and his girlfriend started talking about getting married, he told me that “someday, maybe you’ll experience love like what I have with her.”

March

Xpu-ha beach 2005

In March, I went to Mexico by myself to recharge by the beach. Joe had wanted to go, but I wasn’t willing to pay for his trip. I stayed at a run-down motel that sits on Xpu-Ha beach, about an hour south of Cancun. It was cheap, and my bungalow was 50 feet from the water. I brought my laptop and wrote. I discovered the beach was clothing optional, and after the first day kept my bikini top off most of the time so I didn’t stick out from the other guests. I got multiple massages. I did yoga every morning on the beach, and walked on the sand for an hour every night. I went to Playa del Carmen and danced from midnight until  5 in the morning at a salsa club with the best Cuban band I’d ever heard. I shopped and shopped, looking for souvenirs for Joe and Lauren. I took hundreds of photos. I felt lonely. I could feel something stirring inside of me, a hurricane of all the crap I hadn’t dealt with over the past 15 months, but I pushed it all down again. I was not ready to deal.

May

In May, as the Joe drama was winding down, another drama was winding up. My spending habits had caught up with me.

One day I opened a credit card statement to learn that the company had increased my interest rate from 9.99% to 29.99%. I had never been late making my minimum payment. Apparently, though, only making the minimum payment flagged me as someone dangerous to default. It made no sense: I couldn’t afford to make more than the minimum, so they jacked my rates and increased what that payment was. Within weeks, all five of my credit cards did the same thing. Suddenly, I realized I was about $30k in credit card debt, and my new monthly payments would be equal to nearly two-thirds of my take-home pay. My second mortgage increased again. I was terrified of losing everything again.

I visited a lawyer to inquire about bankruptcy. He counseled me that I made too much money to file Chapter 7 and wipe out all of my debts. Instead, he said, it would be better to settle with the creditors. First, I would have to stop making payments all together. I would have to brace myself for an onslaught of shaming correspondence, he said, but eventually I’d start getting settlement offers. I had never not paid my bills before. I was so embarrassed about the position I’d put myself into. I kept paying my mortgages and my car payments so I wouldn’t jeopardize my biggest assets.

June

Joe and I were through by my birthday. I broke it off with him and it felt like I was going through withdrawals. He was like heroin to me, and in retrospect I see that I was into him because of who he said he was: creative and successful. He was certainly creative, but he was also insane and unsuccessful. My addiction to him made me lose good judgment, and although it was painful to let him go, I had to for my own sanity. (Read all of the Joe chronicles: part 1 and part 2 and part 3.)

Then, I had a nervous breakdown. One day at work, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I had neglected my own health, and had become very hypothyroid due to forgetting to take my medication. My body could not go on until I dealt with all of the emotions that I had stuffed for the previous year and a half. I took a break from everything: work, dating, working out. I cried, and I cried, and I screamed and I punched my pillow. I sat with my therapist twice a week. I went to church. I journaled extensively. I had never before allowed myself to be utterly weak and messy. It felt wonderful to be a mess and not give a shit what anyone thought. I didn’t tell my mom, though, because I knew she wouldn’t approve.

July

By the end of July, I was feeling better. Then Dan called. He wanted to take me to lunch. I was in a serene place, totally in touch with who I am, so I agreed to meet him. At that lunch, I finally found what I had wanted from him for almost 18 years: closure. I learned he was moving to Houston, that he was unhappily married, that he did not believe he could have it all. And he finally answered my question: why did he never choose me? He had many chances, but he always picked someone else over me. His answer was as close to the truth as I think he could ever come: He never thought he could live up to being the man he knew he’d need to be to have me as his life partner. I was able to say goodbye then, for good.

Saying goodbye to Dan triggered something in my heart, a knowledge that I would not be able to fully love someone until all of my what-ifs were solved. So I systematically found every guy I still carried a torch for: my high school crush, my next-door neighbor, the bad boy in high school who I put off because I was too goody-two-shoes. I went out with a couple of them and discovered that everything I thought I liked about them was mere projection. By August, my heart was empty of all old entanglements. I entered into the online dating world again.

August

I read the book “Calling in the One” and did an exercise that helped me figure out exactly what qualities I wanted in my life partner. I wrote a list of 50 characteristics, then whittled it down to 5. I wrote those five characteristics on a card and kept it in my purse. After every date, if the guy did not have at least one of them, I wouldn’t see him again. I joined a meet-up group and began expanding my circle of friends. I went to church at least once a week. I kept dancing. It was one thing besides Lauren that brought me joy.

September

In September, I met a guy online who lived in Minneapolis. We hit it off on email and by phone, and he flew to Denver to spend the last weekend of the month with me. I had a great time showing him my hometown and some of my favorite close-by mountain spots. On Sunday, we went to Morrison and climbed around Red Rocks. Then we went to lunch at the Morrison Inn. A few hours later, as we were driving over the gorgeous and remote Guanella Pass, we both started to get sick. By the time I took him to the airport the next morning, we were both exhausted from food poisoning. I felt better on Tuesday, so I kept another date I’d made for drinks and a movie. But as I sat at a high-top bar table at the Hornet, a trendy bar in Denver’s South Broadway district, I began to shiver. I cut the date short, and by the time I got to my car my teeth were chattering. I turned the heater on full blast and drove home as quickly as I could.

On Wednesday morning, my work colleagues came to my house as planned for our annual retreat. As I cowered in blankets on my couch, my boss insisted that we take my temperature because I looked very ill. It was 104 degrees. My low back ached. My whole body felt like a pincushion. I got an emergency appointment with my doctor, who took one look at me and sent me to the ER. When I arrived at Rose Hospital, I could not sit up. The only way I felt comfortable was curled in a ball on the dirty waiting room carpet. I could not think clearly. My pain was at a level 10. After what seemed like hours, but was probably 10 minutes, a nurse wheeled me back to a gurney. They started me on IV fluids and took my temperature again: 106. My brain hurt.

People poked me with needles and catheterized me since I couldn’t sit upright to pee in a cup. After what seemed to be hours, a doctor came by and told me I had a severe ecoli infection in my bladder, kidneys and blood. I was septic. The tests showed my kidneys were shutting down. My blood pressure was 80/40. I had a CT scan with contrast, and when the tech pushed the contrast through my IV my vein burst. I never knew pain like that before.

I was wheeled to a room. Nurses and doctors huddled around me. I heard the word ICU thrown about. I heard the word dialysis. They started me on three kinds of IV antibiotics and a morphine drip. I dozed in and out of consciousness, coming awake screaming in pain when the morphine wore off. I tried to force the clock forward with my thoughts so I could get another burst of morphine. A roommate came in, and her moans of pain sent me over the edge. I had a panic attack because I thought she was a monster who was going to kill me. I was moved into a private room, given heavy sedatives.

The morphine kept my blood pressure very low. The nurses would not let me see the monitor, but at one point my readings were 50/30.Vein after vein blew out and eventually they put my IV in my foot, which was incredibly uncomfortable.

My mom came. My dad came. My friend Barbie came. Laurel came. They brought me PJs and my pillow from home. They helped me sip broth. I called my ex and asked him to bring Lauren up to see me. I was not sure I was going to live, and I needed my daughter. He refused. I screamed at him. My dad got on the phone and threatened his life. Finally, Lauren was able to come, and I cried as I held her. She was only 4.

The next day I started to feel better. My pain had shrunk, and I stopped the morphine. My blood pressure improved. The nurses stopped looking at me with haunted eyes. Halfway through the third day, I started vomiting. The pain had shifted from a dull ache in my kidneys to a sharp ache in the middle of my stomach. A smart doctor did an abdominal ultrasound and found that my gall bladder had ruptured. Within an hour I was in the operating room. I stayed in the hospital for another two days.

My mom drove me home, and as she sat with me in my living room, I noticed that my hands were swollen. The waistband on my sweats seemed to be getting tighter by the minute. Within 90 minutes of being home, my whole body had swollen to the point that I could hardly distinguish my toes from my foot: everything was a big watery blob. She took me back to the ER, where I got on a scale to discover I had gained 37 pounds in a few hours, all edema. I was re-admitted and underwent a litany of tests, some very painful. I had another CT with contrast, and the pain of that substance being pushed into my vein was so excruciating that I came off the gurney and hit the tech in the face. They administered more sedatives. I was admitted for two more days until the edema subsided. The doctors never could explain what happened to me.

I went home. My friends and family pitched in to help me. Coworkers sent flowers. Lauren came back to me, and my mom stayed with us so she could care for her granddaughter while I slept.

October

I finished a 6-week course of Cipro. My digestive system was a mess, and I could only tolerate the blandest of foods: potatoes, rice, white bread. I lost 25 pounds, celebrating when I weighed a svelte 139 by buying a bunch of clothes in size 4. I was skinny again! I got back on the Internet Dating bandwagon.

The creditor phone calls were starting to reach me at work and on my cell phone. I changed my phone numbers and they found me again. I felt so lost and like a huge loser. I was saving what I would have been paying them in a separate account. I was tempted to start paying again just to end the abuse I was taking. I stopped answering the phone altogether. I was so scared that this scheme would not play out as the lawyer said it would.

I ignored the hospital bills.

November

The trials of dating continued. I went to work, and spent hours each day on match.com, Yahoo! Personals, lavalife.com. I was able to increase my hours to seven full days per pay period, and the extra money came in handy. My ex continued to be a dick, flaunting his love life and his money while crying poor to me when I asked for help paying for Lauren’s teeth cleaning. I was feeling better physically every day, and I returned to the gym. I still couldn’t eat meat or fibrous veggies without winding up in a ball on the floor from stomach pain. I saw a GI doctor who told me digestive issues were common after gall bladder removal, and that I just needed to wait it out. I would eventually get better.

The week before Thanksgiving, I received a letter in the mail from one of my creditors, signed by a real person. The letter was a settlement offer. I called the representative and negotiated a deal: I would pay 20 cents on the dollar of my debt if I could pay it off all at once within the next five business days. He gave me contacts at the other credit card companies, and I worked out similar deals with them as well. The Monday after Thanksgiving, I liquefied my retirement and savings accounts and paid off all of my creditors. I felt such a sense of relief that the ordeal was over.

December

My social life picked up. All of a sudden, I had a dozen new friends. I went to parties every weekend, out to dinner, skiing. I kept setting up dates from match.com. By the second week in December, a pattern had emerged: I’d set a date with a new guy at Starbucks and he’d no-show.

I complained diligently to Laurel, who was experiencing her own dating dilemmas. I thought perhaps the no-showing was unique to guys on match.com. I saw an ad for a new dating site called engage.com, and joined it. After building my profile, I did a quick search for men age 36-42 within 200 miles of Denver. The site was so new that my search returned two matches: a guy with no picture who lived in the mountains and a guy my own age who lived about 20 minutes away from me. By his pictures he was cute. By his profile, we had a few things in common, including a love of South Park and zombie movies. I sent him an email, and then noticed I had an email in my inbox … from him.

His name was Steve.

We chatted by email for a couple of weeks as I became more and more disillusioned by the guys who were standing me up at every turn. The week before Christmas, I told Laurel that I was done with dating. That same day, Steve asked me if I wanted to get lunch. I agreed, figuring it would be my last date for a while. On Dec. 29, 2005, I met him at an upscale Tech Center restaurant called Ya Ya’s Eurocafe. On first look, he was cute. He was about my height, sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, with an athletic runner’s body. We sat in a booth. I ordered the most expensive salad on the menu and a glass of wine. If this was going to be my last date for a while, then I was going out in style, poor sucker.

And then, we started talking. And talking. And laughing. The waiter kept coming by to see if we needed something else, but really trying to get rid of us. Three hours into our lunch date, he asked me for a second date. I agreed. He was fun. He walked me to my car, and as I hugged him goodbye, he went in for a kiss.

It was fast, warm lips pressed against mine, a caress of tongue, but enough to send a shiver down my body and almost cause my knees to buckle. It was the best kiss I’d ever had in my life.

We met the next day to go ice skating in Cherry Creek North. The day was beautiful, in the 50s. We held hands as we hobbled around the small rink, laughing. Turned out that he’d never been skating before. I was impressed that he’d chance making a fool out of himself like that. We continued the date over wine, then he followed me home.

I didn’t want to sleep with him on the second date, and resisting him was difficult. We had a good old-fashioned makeout session before I sent him on his way. Before he left, we made a third date for New Year’s Day.

I spent New Year’s Eve with my friend Barbie, eating at the Trail Dust Steakhouse, then coming back to my place to do some year-end rituals. As we wrote down the beliefs we wanted to release then burned the papers in the fireplace, I found myself thinking about Steve. It had been a long time since I felt so excited about a guy. Our chemistry was palpable, and it went beyond the physical. I really liked him. I sent him a text at midnight: “You should be here, kissing me.”