the hard way

Hello beautiful,

UPDATE: I woke up early enough to need a sweater this morning, I embroidered that same sweater last night with my residents. I finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance (recommended to me by Adam) (incredible book) and I’m around 150 pages out from wrapping up Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (by the time I came back to revise this post, I finished the book, and WOW). I’m wearing less and less makeup day to day (did you know you’re not supposed to exfoliate every day??), and I cut off a bunch of my hair by myself on Saturday. I wrote a song. I watched a whole lot of sunsets last week (7, to be exact), ate a 3-hour lunch while catching up with Quinn, ate a bunch of HaloTop ice cream with Brenna. I found a little café where, if you angle your chair a certain way and really dig into the book you’re reading or the piece you’re writing, you can ignore the fact that there is a crowded, honking parking lot right next to you, but at least they have little wicker chairs and good iced tea. I’m seeing Eighth Grade by Bo Burnham on Thursday, my former history teacher and college recommender and friend Mr. Rust is visiting Friday morning and I’ll see Brenna perform in her first ~professional show~ by Stanford Rep Theatre that night. I’m sure there are more things about this week to look forward to, but hey.

SOME NOTES: My ideal sound would have to be a mixture of Maggie Rogers, Lorde, and 2009 Regina Spektor. I think I have a headache from not drinking enough water today. I definitely have a lot of scars on my arms and legs from all the places I’ve picked at my bug bites. I’m sitting underneath a massive sky right now waiting for sunset and the distances between the different layers of different kinds of clouds are really pronounced. I cannot wait to live in Europe. The floppiest golden retriever puppy is resisting the tug of his owner 50 feet away from me and all he wants in the world is to sniff and play, but his owner keeps trying to just drag him along (now he’s tangled in his leash).

THIS WEEK: I’m now able to read, and I’ve unpacked another thing that was holding me back from deep, meaningful, and truthful self-love.

On Reading

My anxiety and how loud my head is, in general, makes it really difficult to sit down and just read. So, I never read. My head goes in 200 different directions, tells me I should be doing something else– she never gives me a quiet moment when I can just sit down with my book and just read. Well, this week I finished 2 books! I started/finished one and topped off another, and I feel really intensely proud of that. I sat at that café I found and just sipped on my iced tea and genuinely did not want to be anywhere else. It was a different kind of peace that I had never experienced.

(I wish you guys could see this sky right now.)

The second thing

I’m in the process of unpacking a lot a lot, a lot of things, and one thing I realized is that a lot of my hurt comes from, “me, not permitting myself to love myself as much as i love the concepts i construct of the people i admire. when, in reality, all i have to do is love myself as i am, and love the people i admire as they are.” (–a message i sent to peyton). 

So, this is really hard. Clearly. If it wasn’t hard to love myself as I am, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. I wish I knew what changed, in particular, and I wish I could guide you through the process of internalizing this lesson, step-by-step. But, I can’t. Also, I am by no means completely healed, but I’ve caught a glimpse of what it looks like and what it might feel like to truthfully love yourself.

There is a certain kind of decisiveness that is found in how you treat your words and your actions. You don’t hope that you can write a blog post tomorrow, you just resolve to do it. You don’t hope that you leave your room early in the morning to start your day, you just resolve to do it. (This resonated with me when my friend, Charles, briefly mentioned this when he, too, had an epiphany (to state it mildly).) You choose your battles, you aren’t pressed for time in the same way as before, you realize how pointless it is to feel guilty and you worry about how you’re going to fix it. The peace I mentioned above is also a manifestation of this.

I want to write more about whatever I’m processing, but I am still in the midst of unpacking the walking-on-glass-feeling I have whenever I tiptoe around my decisions, my words, my relationships with people I care about most, etc.. I am someone that overcommits and overcorrects. This is because of that walking-on-glass feeling. As a result, I am drastic. I declare new beginnings, I fabricate endings, I commit just for the sake of putting my foot down on something solid. However, in this process (while a lot of beautiful things have come out of it), I have not been a good friend to a lot of people. I have made a lot of mistakes. I have been hurt in many different ways, and I have also hurt others.

It’s easy to harden yourself to vulnerability and relationships when you recognize this. It’s easy to recognize your shortcomings and state, “That’s just who I am,” and while that is true, you can hurt a lot of people that you care about, including yourself, in your stagnancy. So, don’t do that. Unpack, process, learn, grow.

‘Til next week,