A Season of Becoming.
When Adele’s record “25” first came out, I listened to it on repeat in my car for three months straight. If there’s anyone who can write a love ballad that sends chills down your spine, or make your heart hurt so hard, or cause river rapids to flow from your eyeballs, it’s Adele.
It’s Reality, Not Fantasy.
Forever fantasy was not so forever.
The early 1900s marked the beginning of flashing lights, engraved stars, and sidewalks lined with red carpet. Hollywood was based off the idea that through fantasy, people are then able to learn how to desire. In its early stages and expansion, builders were intentional with creating a fantastical aura, to drive people to this little enclave, going as far as changing and redeveloping the city’s landscapes. The original objective of Hollywood was to take individuals away from what was their current reality, and then placing them into a fake reality, so that they could be blinded from their own personal realities.
Love Me, or Leave Me Here.
I opened up a word document getting ready to write about all the awkward, yet frustrating, but also lessons learned “let’s shine a new light in your life” conversations I’ve had with people this week. But then I got distracted, like I do sometimes, and went to check my email inbox instead. After responding to a few work messages, I clicked into my spam box (which is something I almost never do) only to find a piece of writing that wasn’t spam at all. I’m still not really sure how it got in there, but I proceeded to read the email. I think in that moment, it was like God just set me up to write this post because it was everything I wanted to say without knowing how to begin it. It was like God needed me to write this post because I needed to read it back to myself…
Onward Towards the Finish.
I didn’t want to get started at all.
I told myself I wasn’t going to write again until after my busy season of work and travel this summer. I didn’t want the pressure of having to create. And I wanted the next thing I blasted into cyberspace to be meaningful. So I set out onward toward my adventures with my suitcase, my camera, and a notebook tucked in the outer pocket of my backpack within seconds of reach just in case something inspirational came along. The summer had taken me to the East Coast, Europe, and up and down the California coastline a few times. I had plenty of conversations. I met strangers. I snapped photos. I spent a lot of time talking to God over green tea and Italian sunsets. I saw the most beautiful cities in the world and ate the most delicious food (and probably enough pizza and gelato for the year… just kidding, there’s no such thing).
Life is Like a Case of Lupus. (You never know what you’re gonna get…)
You can’t hold unawareness against someone.
I used to get frustrated about it.
All Those Empty Promises.
He told me he would, and then he didn’t.
He told me he’d meet me for coffee at 6pm at the coffee shop down the street. I waited for ten minutes past, allowed him the benefit of the doubt, then gave him an extra twenty because maybe, traffic. But he never showed up. No call, no text, no apology for standing me up and putting the friendship on hold.
He told me he couldn’t wait to come to town and see me. That we’d hang out on Monday after his meeting. I was nothing but excited because we planned to spend the night merrily eating and adventuring and catching up like friends usually do. Monday came around. 3pm, no sound. 4pm, still no sound. 8pm rolled around, and still, no sound.
He told me he wanted to take me on a little journey to the secret spot on top of this hill, the place where he goes to think and rest his soul. We planned to watch a silly chick flick, grab some Yogurtland froyo like we normally do, then head to a location apparently only he knew. An hour before when I was on my way to meet him, I got a message via text saying he forgot he promised to be with his mother at home that evening. Maybe he did, but I later found out that he had spent the rest of the night with another girl at Disneyland where he proceeded to fake propose.
Jumping Into Open Seas.
Gut told me I would be writing about this long before I even sat my butt down in front of the screen and my fingers began typing away on the keyboard. And by gut, I really mean God, because God is in the business of doing things like that. He nudges and inspires you to share certain lessons and happenings in your life. And as a human with a whole lot of resistance and insecurities and hesitancy, and still learning a ton about vulnerability, you’re like nooooppppeeeee no thank you. But you end up doing it anyway because that’s what you should have done in the first place. Jokes on me I guess, so here we go.
This is the year.
If you sent me a message last night, and my head seemed like it wasn’t in the right space… it wasn’t. And, this might be of help to explain some things.
Honest moment: I’m notorious for spending the night before my birthday an emotional wreck.
Every year, the night before my birthday, I snap into some sort of life crisis mode. It’s kind of like the quarter century crisis trying to figure out exactly what I’m doing with my life, even though I might not actually be trying to figure it out. But it’s like this overwhelming anxiety that I get, feeling like I might not be doing life the right way or I’m falling behind for some reason (which, by the way, I know are all lies). It would happen in junior high, and high school, and college, and post-college. And, I wish I could say that since then, those sensations have completely disappeared but then I’d be a terrible liar.
Stems Instead of Roses.
I couldn’t really describe the feeling other than the fact that I felt empty and my insides were all numb that morning, drawing blank spaces as I sat cuddling the blankets on my bed whisking out deep sighs. There was no way of shaking off the hollowness—no amount of Netflix or dark chocolate, or desperate prayers, or stacking up my schedule so that I didn’t have to think about what was happening with my heart. Nothing could fix it. I was a walking corpse; living and breathing, but not actually living. I had given until I literally could not give anymore because there was nothing left in my system to give. It was like I was lying out in the desert, naked and bare, with no access to water for days. I was parched. Completely sucked dry. And very, very tired.
2015: Repaired With Gold Seams.
It’s that time of the year where the catch up sesh game is real strong. You’re running around meeting up with people who are dropping a visit in town, and encountering faces you haven’t seen in awhile at gatherings, reunions, and the like. Not sure if it’s out of common courtesy, or they actually care to know how you’re doing and what you’ve been up to, but the begging questions are always the same: “Hey, how are you? What’s been going on?”
Well, since they asked…
2015 was everything I had hoped it would not be. Life happened, and life happened so hard.
To be honest, I have to reflect and dig with extreme effort in order to draft up a list of everything that went down between January and December. And even then, it’s not quite cohesive enough because most of the year was a strange emotional blur.
