When Dust Settles

Endings keep popping up in conversation lately. Stories of leaving, of finishing. Stories of conclusion. I for one have never been good with endings. I'm a beginnings person, someone who revels in the delight of change and enjoys navigating new territory. Endings startle and stun me, stop me right in my tracks. I never know how to negotiate the aftermath because I'm afraid to see the dust settle.

Looking back, I haven't allowed for many endings. I've managed to steer most of my experiences and relationships so that they land on a forever timeline, or at least something close to it. Come to think of it, some of the most heartbreaking endings have been leaving certain places. I knew as I left those places that my time there was over and I struggled, wrestling with that knowledge and doing my best to pretend it wasn't so. Even now they're the places that tend to fill my daydreams, absence makes the heart grow fonder, etc.

This is all to say that it's hard to close the back cover. With books I find myself clutching the final flimsy pages and re-reading them over and over again, wishing I could stay in the world just a little bit longer. More often than not, I'd rather balance along the edges of an ending, unsteady, than see the conclusion rise up to meet me. Isn't that sort of how it goes, though?

Well, I'm leaving home soon.

Save the Date

Hey, everyone! Ahh what a long hiatus. It feels good to finally write again. Well, the big day is just around the corner and I am currently a very busy, nervous and excited woman. 

Planning our wedding has come down to a lot of little details and decisions; programs, linens, cards, tablecloth colors, doorgifts. And all these choices, sure, they felt important. After all, it's one of the most significant days of our lives, we're standing at the brink of forever, etc. But still, nothing has been quite so special as preparing myself to be a good wife.

I'm also writing my vows, though I'm not gonna read it out loud on the day, it just feels right to write it. I know it's not a part of our tradition. But there's just something kind of magical about writing that promise, about narrowing your big, sweeping, expanse of a love for that person into just a few short sentences.

All along people have been saying some version of the same thing: "It will hit you. At some point in this process, all the love and the forever and the weight of this day will hit you."

And wouldn't you know it, I've been hit, by the words, of course, always by the words. The surprising part, though, is that I didn't feel their weight. I felt their lightness.

Annndd here is save-the-date card for you. Everyone is invited!

Dear Young Hearts

Dear young hearts,

Love is a weird thing, and as you grow older, it doesn't stop getting any weirder or more complex. The love you felt for friends and first loves in high school shifts to a different kind of love in college, which shifts again as you enter adulthood. And each time you fall in love, it'll be different, too. You are, after all, the only thing that stays the same in each relationship you enter, no matter how much you think you have a "type" or that you're doomed to repeat the same relationship over and over again. 

When you're in your 20s, though, there's a lot that flies up in the air all at once. You're juggling a job and debt and a social life and trying to figure out who you are, now more than ever, and some things feel like they slip through the cracks here and there. Relationships sometimes seem like more trouble than they're worth unless you're in them (and sometimes even then, on the bad days), but that doesn't mean that you won't fall in love. You can try, to avoid it, but it'll happen. You can't outrun falling in love.

And whatever the outcome, heartbreak or happiness, forever, or just that momentary second, it'll teach you something about yourself, and about what you do and don't want in your life. Because you need love, and you need it in multiple forms. But what does it mean to love, when you can barely juggle your bills and your student loans and everything else in between? And who do you choose to love? Do you even choose at all? (After all, sometimes it's the love that finds you.) But those are different questions for a different day. So here's the 5 people you'll fall in love with in your 20s.

1. A complete stranger. 

It'll be the cute guy with the perfect hair you see on the bus, or the girl whose carefully-edited Instagram lures you into thinking you really know who she is, or the sales rep who you swear always flirts with you when they make the rounds to your office. It could be anyone, someone whose coffee you accidentally grabbed for at the shop, someone who interacted with a tweet once, someone who you saw in a restaurant and imagined a whole future with in 5 seconds, only as long as you keep them at a distance. This is crucial. You might never see them again, or you might see them under the circumstances that you can't make a move to be something more. But you'll unload all your craziest fantasies onto them without their ever knowing, both because it's less of a burden for you to carry, all of these goals and no one to share them with, turns into all these goals with a make-believe someone else, and because it's less of a risk. You never have to put your heart on the line. You can love from afar. And even unreciprocated love is real. But it's not sustainable, and you'll have to give them back their stranger status eventually, even if you felt like you knew them inside and out. You never did. They were never yours to know. Your idea of them was the only thing you had a right to love. 

2. Someone who could have been.

This can happen frequently now that we live in a world where our memories are preserved forever online. You'll see someone's name pop up on Facebook, or in a throwback photo or at a reunion, and you'll wonder. What could have gone differently? What would you have to do differently to keep them in your life, to keep the relationship going, or to have a relationship at all? And when your 20s are a crazy whirlwind of ups and downs, it seems like a great escape to revert back to your past, and what was once familiar and safe. This is not where you grow, however. Sure, sometimes you realize someone's been under your nose the whole time, but not always. Life isn't a Hollywood romantic comedy, and often, people were left in your past for a reason. Playing a game of could-have-been is an endless free fall. See what lies ahead. You know what could have been, but you don't know yet what could be. And that surprise is magical. 

3. Someone who could give you everything.

You will fall in love with them in the abstract way, that you love the idea of who they are, of where they've been and what they've achieved, because you'll either want to follow in their footsteps, or glean off their success. It's natural to do the latter; in your 20s, you're still young and starry-eyed despite your crappy walk-up, and going on a date with your boyfriend with a Ferrari seems like the way to beat the system. But beyond the material, you'll also fall in love with a boss you really admire, or a mentor whose career you'd love to learn from, and you'll realize that falling in love is not always romantic. Sometimes, it's just fuel. Sometimes it helps remind you why you need to keep pushing to achieve your goals. Sometimes it's just a sign that the path you're on is the right one. (Just don't get inappropriately moon-eyed around your boss. That's weird.) 

4. Your best friend.

Your early adulthood is going to be cold and quiet and lonely at times, and you're going to wonder how it is that people meet other people, and you'll reach out and latch onto the few people who you already have in your life. You'll never want to let go, and you don't have to. Help each other move into crappy apartments and eat pizza on the floor before you unpack. Call each other and text each other and chat each other off the record and snapchat ugly faces and cling as tightly to one another as you possibly can. Learn what it's like to worry about another person so unconditionally that you can tell they're having a bad day just by the length of their texts. Have people wonder if you're actually in a real relationship, but know that this is the truest relationship either of you have ever been in (and that this is not a bad thing). We say best friends are forever in school, and we test these notions in college, but it's in your 20s that you learn the true depth of being in love with your best friend. 

5. Yourself.

At the very least, I really hope you do. Everyone deserves to know what it's like to know that someone loves them just as they are in that moment. It doesn't mean anything less, and sometimes, it even means more, if that person is you.

Looks May Fade, But Selfies are Forever

I've never been very big on compliments. I never quite learned how to take them, in part because I always thought that if you accepted a compliment, people would think you're conceited (and surprise, surprise: they do) and in part because it took a long time for me to believe these things. When people complimented how good I was at school, I shrugged it off because it was never like I tried. That's not a humblebrag, I promise. When they told me I was funny, I balked. And when they said I was pretty, I...well, I'm still working on that one.

It's not lost on me, then, that I work in a world that's very surface, What you wear, how you do your makeup, what your scarf looks like on any given day, how you can arrange your life to look just so on Instagram. And I've learned that sometimes, the bits of your life that you want to capture and share with the world are the moments where you feel your best. And a lot of the time, you can feel your best when you feel like you look your best. Also, why are we still so pegged on this idea that caring about how you look is inherently bad?

Sure, there are deeper things in this world to think about. There's atrocious poverty and war and people are constantly fighting for equal rights. But to capitalize on these things for what? The likes? For people to think that we're aware of what's going on in the world and that somehow makes us better than the people who aren't posting about it? If all you're doing is joining in on the social trend du jour, and you're not actually doing anything to change the world for the better, is that really less surface than an iPhone photo of somebody's eyebrows?

Because if there's one thing I've learned, it's that learning to love yourself is a lifelong process. There are days when I wake up and I think I'm pretty (so you agree, you think you're pretty? Lol.) and then I'll wake up the next day and think I'm nothing special. And those are the days I'll put a little extra effort into my makeup, or choose my outfit a little more carefully, because I know I'm going to need the confidence boost to power through. But I'm not chronicling that for the compliments. I never want to be someone who exists online to be pretty. I want to empower. I want to show people that yeah, you can own how you look and what you do and that you shouldn't apologize for either. I want people to not only know that it's not a bad thing to have high self-esteem, but to believe it, and to have it themselves.

You deserve that. Really. And so I don't think I'll ever get "good" at accepting compliments online. I hate it when men try to slide into DMs or try to hit on me, because that's not what I'm here for. That's not the space I'm trying to occupy, and to be frank, that detracts from the message that you can be here for yourself. Not for anyone else to think you're pretty, but for you to think that you are pretty, and not to need validation from anyone else. 

Learning to say "thank you" wouldn't hurt, of course. But the next time you catch yourself judging someone's 5th selfie in a week, ask yourself when was the last time you complimented yourself. And then do it. Revel in yourself. Because you should. Because there's nothing wrong in that. And if someone has an issue with it, it's just too bad that they're too blind-sighted to revel in how awesome you are with you, too

Grow a Thicker Skin

Something I've been thinking about lately is toughness. Being tough, being strong, being resilient, being scrappy, being brave, being stubborn, being unfazed and unrattled and unshakable and relentless. Being confident. All of these these things are synonyms in places, overlapping like a weird venn diagram of words and emotions and feelings. These are all good things to be and to have, and work as assets no matter who you are or what you do. Everyone's faced with criticism and critique, and everyone has to rise again from setbacks. That's how life works. It ebbs and flows.

But of all these tools in the spectrum of human emotion that help get you from valleys to peaks and back again, I don't want to have a thick skin. I don't want things to bounce off of me. I want to feel. Even if the feeling sucks. But the feeling's a reminder that I'm human. 

In some ways, thinking you're not human, that you're superhuman, and maybe even invincible, is helpful. It's the adrenaline that pushes you through something scary and challenging, and makes you think you're stronger than you are. Fire isn't as scary if you don't feel the flame. And whether you work or even just spend part of your life in a digital space, you learn pretty quickly to let things bounce off you. We're told to know better than to read the comments. People send nasty messages to complete strangers, either forgetting or ignoring the fact that there's another person and not just an anonymous computer screen on the other side of those words. It seems like the news is reporting on another atrocity every single day. Life would, in theory, be so much easier if you felt and reacted less.

But I don't think that's the way to go about it. Often, telling someone else to grow a thicker skin is to excuse the actions of everyone around them. "People are awful, don't let them get to you." But of course awfulness is going to get to a person. Of course it'll bug someone. That's human nature. You can't tell a person to not feel, just because it keeps the status quo intact.

And okay, sometimes people can be hypersensitive about some things, but they have the right to feel any which way they choose. You can't tell them that a feeling is wrong. And excusing the actions of other people, that oh, people are just overwhelmingly shitty, grow a thicker skin, move on, is to excuse that shittiness and let it keep happening. Sure, you can only control your own actions and not the actions of other people, but your actions can also include taking other people to task when their actions are bad. You don't have to ignore, and you don't have to roll over, and you don't have to simply accept things as they are. You don't have to grow a thicker skin. 

You can and should be resilient. You should stand your ground as much as you can, and especially when it's for things that are right. But don't grow a thicker skin. Don't teach yourself how to not feel. Let things affect you. Let things get under your skin and crawl up your veins and sit uncomfortably with you until you do something about them. Call people out when they say mean things to you. Stand up for yourself, and for anyone else you see being bullied or put down. 

We may mostly be grown ups, but we're still not so far from the playground. And sometimes on the playground, you'd skin your knee and it'd sting and you'd get gravel and grit in your scrape, and it'd hurt, but you'd remember that sting and you'd learn. Sometimes it's your own damn fault. But sometimes it wasn't. Just because somebody else pushed you over didn't make that sting hurt any less. And sometimes, those scrapes left scars. Sometimes, those moments of vulnerability lead to lessons and breakthroughs. Those moments of weakness often tell us who we really are.

Be strong and confident and believe in yourself and know when people say things, sometimes they say wrong things just to get to you. By all means, be stubborn and be smart about the fact that the internet is often dumb and people on the internet say dumb things and it's often smart to ignore these things. But having that wisdom is different than having a thick skin. Don't confuse the two, whatever you do. Don't grow a thick skin, or at least keep parts of it vulnerable. Feel. Be human. Be imperfect. Be alive.