Open Heart

It was today, upon entering Manhattan on the R train that things begin to settle.

When we last spoke, my life was, for all intents and purposes and for the matter of simplicity, pretty great. Things were going exactly as I wanted, and I was right where I thought I needed to be. I had a steady job I didn't necessarily care for, complete with dental, biweekly direct deposit, and a crippling sense of my youth slipping away under the facade of adulthood – pretty standard, by all accounts.  I had an active social life, complete with random encounters with that guy I kept running in to, or the girl I swore I would stop drinking with. I had a calendar overflowing with commitments I could honor or dishonor if I wanted, and a slew of dating profiles floating out amongst the masses and interwebs. I had a bookshelf filled with future reads, a fridge packed with food that I never touched, updated resumes hiding on my work computer, and piles of papers in a “to be sorted” file that continually grew until it became a “to be sorted” box.  My room was too small for my bed and my tiny Brooklyn apartment was too cluttered. I had roommates I adored and would take impromptu drunken-stupor-like walks from the village to Brooklyn across the Williamsburg bridge, entering the land of Never Never Land once more.

And then, as the infamous line states, everything changed.  Only this time, I am the one who changed everything.  As a recap, last summer, I was unhappy.  I was not in a good place, physically or mentally.  After an approximately one and a half month period of a not-so-attenuating depression and unintentional ten-pound weight loss, I decided I was done feeling sorry for myself.  I looked at my life and I asked myself two very simple questions: Why am I doing the things I am doing?  What do I want my life to look like?  Blast some girl-power-self-inspiring playlists (and maybe some 90’s era angst-y Lillith Fair) through the speakers and follow along.

I walked into October as one person, and emerged in June as another. Yet along the way, I stumbled into an old version of myself I thought I had lost, and really missed very much. I find that now, I'm rediscovering my zest, my drive, my motivation, mojo, and essence. It's all very esoteric and bizarre and wonderful and, for the first time in maybe 2 years, I feel genuinely happy.  Happy with myself, happy with where I am, happy with where I’m headed.  I was too distracted for too long - too overwhelmed by what I thought I was supposed to be doing, and less focused on what I should have been doing: discovering myself, enjoying my life, exploring my 20s, smiling at strangers and the occasional metaphorical dancing in the rain, if you will.

At the risk of sounding conceited, I’m really quite proud of myself.  In the past year, I have done things I never thought I would do.  I’ve said yes more than I’ve said no; I’ve explored new places and new surroundings without fear; I’ve changed jobs, twice, and not looked back; I’ve re-inspired myself and re-engaged myself in living the life I always wanted to live; I’ve surrounded myself with the positive and removed all the negative; I found what I (thought I had) lost and reclaimed it; I thought about what I wanted my life to look like, and I made it happen.

 

But most importantly, I took back what I so foolishly let slip away from.  I reclaimed my life as my own.

After all the ups and the downs, the hills and the slides, I feel like, maybe now, things are settling down to a happy medium.  Life is just returning to a normal. A normal I'm not sure I remember. A normal at the opposite spectrum of what I ever believed to be possible.

It’s simply incredible what can happen when you open your heart.

Those Moments When

Moments are funny things. They can be as fleeting as a passing thought, or as long as the ten seconds that felt like an eternity when you forgot your words on stage. They can be light and fluffy and nonsensical, or heavy realizations you never thought you’d actually stumble across – those cliché moments you’ve heard about, seen illustrated, but never lived; Moments that can make life worth living, while simultaneously making things undeniably real and present.

Those moments when you realize your parents aren’t your perfect superhero’s; When a plastic ball pit becomes a germ-invested booger-fest rather than an endless sea of bottomless fun; When your dream job becomes something that will help you live first, and make you happy second; When saving money isn’t easy because you need to pay bills and eat and live; When you can no longer eat whatever you want without actually focusing on exercising because metabolism is a real thing, and it does catch up with you; When you don’t marry your first love; When you realize you can’t actually have an apartment like Rachel and Monica did, because in New York City, it would cost over $10,000 a month– and not a lot of people make that; When you start thinking about having to take care of your parents, and how on earth you are going to be able to do that when you can just take care of yourself; When the Naked Cowboy in Times Square doesn’t seem like a fun tourist attraction, but a million health violations waiting to happen (no, I will not touch him); When you hope your grandmother will be around long enough to see you walk down the aisle and dance at your wedding; When you walk through Forever 21 and feel old because most of the dresses don’t really fit on your hips correctly; When you have hips; When you move past your first job, feeling jaded by an experience and hoping it doesn’t effect you going forward; When it absolutely effects you going forward; When a productive weekend means you cleaned your entire apartment, did laundry, and went food shopping; When you realize you are growing up.

I have made the startling realization that I am doing just that - growing up.  It's not that I'm unhappy about it.  On the contrary, I'm actually enjoying it all.  This isn't to say that I'm not going to run barefoot through an open fire hydrant, or do cartwheels down the beach and run into the ocean.  It's just that now, these moments count more.  I recognize how fortunate I am to have opportunities to play and leap, take off for a weekend here and there, adopt a cat or get a piercing.  Perhaps they are just more meaningful now.  Or maybe, I'm just appreciating the little things.  I like appreciating the little things.