Unsteady Ground

For many years, I’ve wanted a passport.  Over the last few years, I’ve missed a couple of opportunities to travel because I haven’t had a passport.  I decided that I would no longer miss out on those opportunities. On September 30, I applied for a passport for the first time in my life.  And I was told I didn’t have enough proof of my name change to complete the application process. Let’s walk through this.   My given name is Cristen Leann Heath.  That’s the name on my birth certificate.  That’s what my parents named me, but they never called me Cristen.  Ever.  On the first day of Kindergarten, I didn’t raise my hand during roll call because the teacher called out “Cristen.”  I didn’t know who that was.   When I got married, I took my marriage certificate over to the Social Security Office to change my name.  I asked if was possible to drop “Cristen” and use Heath as my middle name.  The person at the counter said...

I decided to start this blog last year when I had a lot of life happening, and a lot running through my head.  I felt like I had no solid ground under my feet.  Hence the title that’s been sitting unused for a year.  I had so much going on up there, I wasn’t sure where to start this blog.  The first post kind of sets the tone, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted this to be.   Well.  Here we go… June 2016, my best friend walked across the room, took the ring off of my finger, and said he was leaving.  While the relationship hadn’t been good for months, I was still taken by surprise.  I was still devastated.  I spent months in mourning and in solitude.  September 3, 2017 would have been my first wedding aniversary.  It passed me by without much thought.  A week later, when I realized the date had passed, I was elated that I hadn’t remembered and that I’d had no feelings about it.  The realization of forgetting the date ma...