How 'Nita Got Her Groove Back

My blog is starting to whisper to me again, like a love song on a summer breeze.

I don't feel pulled to jump back into the long, strange saga of Conspiracy Theory just yet, but I do feel pulled to write. That's a good start.

It's hard to believe that it's been a month since my last post, but it's been one of the best months of my life.

I'm starting to get my mojo back.

Freed of the stress of three years of jobs that I hated, I'm free to remember and partake of things that I love. Like yoga. I'm seven weeks into a consistent, three-times-a-week practice, and my back, neck and hips are starting to thank me.

I'm two-and-a-half-months into "Sugar Sobriety." I made a promise to myself – and kept it – that I would not eat sweets or desserts at all, unless it was a social occasion with friends. It's made life so much easier. No more making excuses for eating tubs of Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Cups. The weight has been pouring off of me. I'm 17 pounds lighter since May, and 29 pounds lighter since I went back to Weight Watchers last spring.

I've been cleaning up my very cluttered home office. It was a treasure-trove of bad-job nightmares. Notes from job interviews (before I took the jobs that turned out to be duds), receipts from boring business trips, performance reviews that made me question what I was doing with my life. Even piles of audition "sides" from three years ago, when I pulled the plug on my acting dreams, went back to work and started shoveling chocolate down my throat as a panacea for the pain.

Last week, I actually booked and shot a student film that came to me out of the blue. The experience underlined and punctuated a lot of the reasons I stopped acting (playing a loudmouthed tollbooth operator named Laronda, no racial stereotyping there), but it still felt good to know that I could shake off the rust, win an audition and shoot a scene.

And I finally decided to tackle the elephant in the room: the fact that I'm not dating at all and haven't been in a serious, committed relationship since I broke up with Brown more than 10 years ago. I joined a support group based on the Calling in the One book, so I'll be spending the next seven weeks really discovering what I want in a relationship and what's holding me back from having it.

I'm looking forward to actually being able to talk about new guys I'm dating and new lessons I'm learning, instead of merely resurrecting the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past in an effort to understand how I could have been so stupid or why I ever dated so many pointless, abusive jerks.