This week marks the one-year anniversary of selling the family home.

I was walking the dogs yesterday and wandered past the old place. It was the strangest feeling. Despite having lived there for seven years, it felt completely foreign to me, like another lifetime.

I did a bit of rubbernecking, trying to peer in the front windows and check what changes the new owners have made, but it was idle curiousity.

It was strange feeling no emotional connection to somewhere that was our home for so long and filled with so many memories.

Last June, I wrote:

[My ex] wondered if we should withdraw the house from the market and wait until spring to sell. He suggested I’d be fine to stay here for a few months longer. A bit rich considering he couldn’t even stomach two nights to mind the pets because it was too “emotionally difficult”. When I noted the irony, he was all like “well, it’s not my home anymore.”

You know what, buster, it’s not mine either. That little fairytale was destroyed in February.

I want a new home, a place that’s all mine. Something I can create new happy memories inside.

While I’m usually my own harshest critic, I’m proud of myself for doing just that: I found a new place, I bought it on my own and I’m filling it with new happy memories.

Go me!

It’s also a year ago this week that I signed a contract to return to the workplace.

So much has changed for me, most of it for the better.

I would NEVER have predicted turning myself around from such despair in just 12 months.

I’ve always been a great believer in Fate. Not throwing up your hands in the air and just letting yourself be buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but trusting that Fate has a plan for you. I would always tell myself when times got tough: “You’ll look back in a year or two and think ‘ah, so that’s what Fate had in store for me!'”

A year ago things were pretty messed up. It was hard to keep the faith in Fate.

But Fate did have a plan. And it was a good one.

Song of the day: Talking Heads “Once in a lifetime”