“Just What I Needed.”

I was just telling my co-worker that nearly every item in my apartment came off the street or handed down. What typically happens for me is I notice a need in the apartment, say, I want a new waste-paper basket for my bathroom. And, more often than not, within a week or so, I’ll pass the perfect one on the street.

Most of the items in my house happened this way. Including the new kitchen table I just acquired and am typing on today. Because as point of fact, I’d just been saying and thinking how I want a new, less rickety kitchen table. And lo, yesterday, I ran into an upstairs neighbor who is moving and getting rid of things, and I asked to see what she had left, and there’s that Ikea table I’d admired but didn’t want to buy. And now, it’s here, in my home.

The reason I bring it up today is that I have recognized that when I have clarity of vision, I tend to get what it is I want. The perfect semi-matching bedside table, the pull-out couch that nestles perfectly in the alcove, a set of new colorful bowls and plates to replace the staid gray ones I’d bought at Goodwill.

Each of these I envisioned before they appeared. And so, I feel, will the job.

I do know how I want to structure and spend my day. I do know the kind of routine I want and the kind of impact I want to have.

And yet. It’s the waiting, the focusing, the action, the getting there, the pause.

With each newly acquired piece in my home, I am reinforcing the belief and faith and trust that if I dream it, it will come. If I am particular and specific, it will come.

It’s time once again to write a job ideal, and perhaps a relationship ideal while I’m at it, as I continue to release relationships that don’t serve me.

In fact, I’ve noticed as I look at my list of relationships to amend (people I’ve fallen out of touch with for self-preservation [but feel guilty about it], men I intrigue with even though there’s no possibility or desire for more, and the third category, my job that I haven’t wanted that’s been the same one dressed in different clothes for decades), each of these categories can be boiled down to: Molly staying in relationships she doesn’t want to be in.

Molly staying for the crumbs, the guilt, the fear of emptiness. Molly staying because it’s the “right” and “good” thing to do. Molly staying because she believes she can’t have what she really wants.

Each of these amends boils down to believing I’m worth attaining what I really want.

It’s so easy to believe and reinforce this when it comes to kitchen furniture! it’s harder to believe I can have what I want when it comes to people.

It is a sad and lonely habit to continue to hang on to relationships that don’t work, that aren’t fulfilling, that aren’t meeting my needs because of a belief that something is better than nothing.

It’s funny. My voice teacher had me practice “As long as he needs me” from Oliver the other week. Did I know the song, he asked? Yes. Yes, I know the song. I live the song.

I will stay on as long as he, she, they, it needs me. No matter how it’s hurting because “if you’ve been lonely, then you will know, when someone needs you, you love them so.”

So, I guess I should correct it to say I have lived the song. But I don’t really anymore, or I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to settle, I don’t want to stay small, I don’t want to be scared of what may or may not come to me.

I want to believe, that just as I knew my kitchen table would arrive when it was supposed to, that my job and my healthy relationship will as well.

With a little visioning, of course. And perhaps a new theme song.