Updates and Thoughts from me to you

I am slowly coming out of my annual hibernation. The sun is still out at 7:30pm, it’s 85 degrees, life is good. 

I have loved the summer for as long as I can remember, and not just because my birthday is one of the last days of June. Summer always held promise. It felt like a long, exhaled breath after being stuck in a school building for 9 months of the year. It had unvarnished potential. The days seemed to stretch for miles. There would be no guarantee what the next 2 months would hold, which is why I think I loved it so much. I looked forward to the sun in my eyes, the sand between my toes, and sunscreen streaked on my skin. Summers look different now that I am an ‘adult’. Summer is not synonymous with spontaneity and fun anymore; it's just a few more months at the office that all blend together. I vow to do what brings me joy this summer by bringing the spontaneity back to my summer days as best as I can. 

This simply can’t be the same brain that used to write essays in a few days throughout my educational career. It’s so hard for me to come up with topics to write about these days. Maybe that’s because I’m happy, but maybe part of growing up is accepting the monotony  of daily life. I like my job, and I’m grateful for every opportunity to grow. I love my boyfriend and love our life together. I love my family, even though I wish I could see them more often.  I love my friends; we always make time for each other, and they are some of the best people I know. I go to therapy and have been medicated for years, and I’m very open about that. I exercise and eat in a way that isn’t restrictive but allows me not to always be living inside my head and body. I have grown so much over the past few years. I have added people to my life who have truly changed me for the better, and I hope I have done the same for them. 

Despite all of this, I get a gnawing in my stomach that something is missing. That something is writing. 

I call myself a wannabe writer, but I don’t know what that really means. I have written in journals most of my life, detailing the day to day account of my childhood through my teen years. I started this blog in mid-college as I was going through my eating disorder recovery, as a way to hold myself accountable and reach out to others who may be experiencing something similar. My blogs have ebbed and flowed over the years but the main theme at the crux of most is nostalgia. That’s who I am at my core, a girl nostalgic for when life felt simple. 

Writing used to be so easy to me, or at the very least more fun to do. Maybe that’s not true, and I’m just wearing rose-colored lenses when thinking about the past, but what else is new?

I’m turning 28 in a few months, which is deeply scary to think about, and I want to believe that if my 8-year-old self could see me, she would be both surprised and impressed. I think she would mainly be surprised that I’m living with a boy and that I still sleep with Lamby every night. I kind of wish that could happen, that different versions of me could all come visit and see me now. I know they are all ~inside~ me, but I want to talk to my younger self and my older self, for that matter. If you were in a room with different versions of yourself, what would you say? What would you ask? I’d ask them how they are, if they are happy, and if they are proud of me, and I’d pray the answer is yes.

I got a Facebook message the other day, an invitation for my 10-year high school reunion. Time is speeding by. I don't know if i will be in attendance, truthfully, the only people I care about reuniting with are the girls in my group chat. 

I had grown up with them, went through the most formative years of our lives together, and now we only talk on occasion. It's a sad fact of growing older that friendships change and grow just like we do. As we were all hurriedly messaging about the potential 10-year reunion, we started to fill each other in on the highlights of what may have been missed over the past few months. It's a weird and truly sad feeling to go from knowing the ins and outs of a person's life to not knowing when important events occur in their daily life. We all have different priorities now, lives that demand to be lived, and we are not the #1 people in each other's lives anymore. It's a hard pill to swallow, to go from knowing someone so well to barely knowing them at all. That isn't to say we can't know each other again down the line. Who knows where the world may take us? 

It made me nostalgic, as most things do, and deeply sad for a reason I couldn't quite explain. So, I called my mom. Mom, as always, gave me some stellar advice. Feeling this way is natural and expected, especially given how important those girls were to me for the majority of my life. It would make sense to grieve the loss of that. We are different people than we used to be. We have grown and changed over the past years, our lives diverging from each other when they used to proudly intersect. No matter where our lives may take us, I know we will always come back to each other in some way. It is great to catch up and hear how they are doing, what their lives look like now. I will always be in their corner, rooting for them and all of their success, and I know that they are doing the same for me, too.  

How did it get so late so soon? It's weird to think that one day it was the very last day my friends and I played outside together. When was the last day my sister and I used our Barbies as facets for our seemingly never-ending imaginations?  How quickly childhood comes racing to an end. It's unceremonious. Slowly, we start to care more about the opinions of our peers than our imagination. Until one day, the girl who used to write about fairy tales and ride make-believe horses on her swing set seems like a distant memory. Why should whimsy and joy have an expiration date? As I enter my 28th year around the sun, I want to experience life with the same thrill and zest as I did when I was 8. Life is far too short not to live it joyfully, and I know I will be trying my best to do that every day. 

If you got this far, thank you for reading! My apologies if this was more disjointed than previous posts. I have decided that when the urge to write calls me, I will listen, even if what I'm writing doesn't have a specific flow. Writing has always been a release for me; it allowed me to say what I needed to say without sometimes ‘actually’ saying it. I’m working on being less rigid with myself and allowing the fun to come back to writing and hopefully the joy too. 

:)