i am grateful for the discomfort
the wonderful blissful discomfort that keeps me squirming on questions
i am grateful for the questions, the asking, the search. the way my mind cannot sit still and tells stories like a choose-your-own-ending mystery book
i loved those.
i am grateful for the search and the stories
for they keep me away from the escape routes and the complacency and the “it’s just how life is”
because really, nothing ever is Just How Life Is. what a cop-out!
there is ALWAYS a search, ALWAYS a question, ALWAYS a brilliant mystery that can’t really be objectively solved, because the solution is in the choice and lord knows we’ve got a chapter book’s worth of those.
i know no answers and i know no endings. i do not know how to just forget you or start over fresh or blank my slate or speak without ellipses…
everything is linked and my sense of time is majorly skewed for someone too young to blur it all together. 20something years seems like yesterday and i can still feel the hurt when my preschool teacher told me to stop staring at the drawings hung up on the wall (that, side note, I drew) and get in line with the other kids.
i would hurt over EVERYTHING, and i don’t really know why i remember it all.
i remember the sights of my classrooms, the fantastical laundry chute in my best friend’s house, the Calvin Klein hand lotion my second grade teacher kept on her desk, that i stole pill-sized drops of because the floral scent made me feel like I was part of the adult world. i remember walking around the hospital gift shop with my grandmother while waiting to visit my new baby brother – she bought me a fancy doll I picked out in a white wedding gown. I didn’t pick her because she was a bride. i picked her because, obviously, she was the prettiest one there and, obviously, the only one who had her shit together to make herself look like a sophisticated classy lady. all the others were in cheesy kids clothes.
i am so grateful for my age and this feeling i have that i don’t belong. let me be ageless! let me be the misfit, the odd girl out, the one who knows she is mortal and time is limited but really doesn’t get freaked out because she knows we have all the time we need, no more, no less.
let me bask in this aloneness, this beautiful weirdo of a soul that uncontrollably loves and lives such an unbridled passionate existence that it sometimes hurts. i was a 56 hour labor. i mean, what baby takes 56 hours to say What Up? this one right here. i’m convinced it was because of the love i already possessed; the fear that if i was separated from my mother that i wouldn’t be secure in that love any more. i loved her so much i could not bear the thought of being apart. i think that was it.
and here I am, twentysomething years later. what up. still in a state of wonderment and still loving so furiously that i can never separate myself from it. it kicks me in the ass when i have obligations i cannot fulfill or when i make a call a day too late or reach out when i already know there will be no response.
but how grateful am I that it’s not the response that keeps me alive?
how grateful am I that I see the moment and the nuance and the twinkle that ultimately makes up the mosaic of my bigger-picture self?
how grateful am i for the void that i never ever want to go away because it holds me in the brilliant discomfort of not knowing?
I love appreciating the day, myself, my life. It feels really good to appreciate.