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Wednesday Lily finally learned to crawl! I was afraid to go to sleep last night thinking that it was just a dream and I'd wake up today to a baby that just sat on the floor. But no! She's not moving quickly, but she's moving. Slow and steady. That's my Lily. I'm so incredibly proud of her. She's on her way to walking. She pulls up on everything, and learned the hard and incredibly traumatic (for both of us) way that she cannot pull up on TV trays.

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the way people view me. As in, when they look at me what is their immediate reaction? Since I've lost my job, and I realized that the 'work' friends that I had are just that...work. They don't call anymore or text me or even FB me to see how things are going. It's like I've dropped off the face of the Earth. And it occurred to me, for the first time like a brick wall, that perhaps I have been pushing people away. More than just with my words, I mean.

Once, when I first moved to Florida and I worked for a big box home improvement store, a woman came in looking for blinds. She was with her parents, and she was in a wheelchair all bandaged up with her leg in a cast. I've never forgotten the look on her face. She looked like just a shell was left. There was nothing behind her eyes. Her soul had left her body. She stared blankly with no emotion and while she was shopping with her mother, her father came and spoke to us about getting some blinds cut.

"My daughter just moved here from NY." he said, "She came with her husband and two children. She just got out of the hospital. They were in an accident on the drive down and her husband and both children were killed. She wanted to stop here on her way to the house because she couldn't fathom living in a fishbowl by herself with nothing on the windows. She's closing on the house tomorrow so we'll need them now."

He went on from there to say that they had sold everything they had in NY because they could afford to own a home in Florida.

I'll never forget that woman...and now, looking back, I was that woman.

I'm sure other people turned away from me. I've never been big on new friends or large groups of friends, but I'm pretty sure that even those that I was close to saw the missing person behind my eyes. They walked away, slowly at first, until I was left alone. Now I have two good friends IRL, but I have all of you guys here. And for that, I am grateful beyond words. But IRL, I'm alone again without the people that I thought were friends...and you know, I doing just fine!

If I push people away now it's because they are uncomfortable. If I push them away now it's probably because there is a reason. But I'm trying my very best to not be that woman again.

What do you do to get back out in the social swing of things? Has loosing your babies affected the way you make friends or the friends that you keep now? I find myself with social anxiety now which I've never had before, what do you do to combat that?