30

I’ve been having this experience lately where I am sort of brought back into a memory through the engagement with a familiar context. Like I know this is sort of just like saying when you revisit a place that you have been absent from for some time and you are in that specific area of the world it has a sort of feeling. Maybe you feel differently. Maybe the place has changed. Maybe your old bedroom in your childhood home is a strangers gun room . I don’t know. Regardless, there is a sort of pull into that memory and reflection. Sometimes it’s a trigger for something traumatic that has happened. Or perhaps it’s a sadness that seeps through my demeanor when I engage the space.

I’ve just been thinking about that conversation. The place and the person. The self that is becoming or unearthing or re-birthing and the place that is changing as well. I’m currently on my way back to the Midwest to see loved ones and celebrate my 30th birthday. It’s curious to be driving these stretches of highway from California to Kansas City that have meant different things to me over the years. Now they mean something else.

I remember when I first set out on my solo trip to California and how fragile I felt in myself. I was in a sort of off balanced state coming out of a deep depression and trying to find a way of being in the world that didn’t feel like suffocation all the time. I have started saying that I don’t live in the foyer of my heart anymore and I feel like that language gets close to what has happened to me. It’s not that I haven’t ever had a sense of something deep in myself before now. I think it’s more like I had so many narrative structures in place about my life and who I could be in the world that I was crippled by fear and a shame around being me. My little life is not something I will apologize for any longer.

It’s a blessing to feel the truth in a sweet way that what we sow we reap. I sowed a lot of tears in my late 20’s. It was an unraveling that cost me a great deal. But I think there’s something really beautiful about losing that life. Losing those structures that had kept me bound to a small narrative about who I can be in this life. There is something to be found when I make peace with what has been in my story and allow for what could be. The idea that what I care deeply about is enough to put my energy into in this life.

The world needs true friends. So much pain going around from one person to another. I would like to be true and then be truer still. I’d like to let my sense of humor be whatever it is and laugh very hard at things I find funny. I’d like to cry when I need to and I won’t apologize for tears anymore. I want my friends to feel that they can always cry in my presence. It’s okay. This world has a lot to cry about. A lot to smile about too sometimes. I’d like to always be willing to have the conversations that will clear the energy between us. That will create a knowing that we have because we are vulnerable together and speak the truth. I’d like to carry the fire that I’ve got in my belly till I die. I’d like to share the oceanic aspects of my internal landscape in a way that draws people towards an interaction with beauty and wonder. I’d like to show my love in ways that the presence of it is deeply understood without having to always use language to add context. I’d like to live a life that acknowledges my personal fears and anxiety and still says yes to the deep things in me that I long to bring into this world. I’d like to go to my death with an open heart and clear eyes. There’s more to say and I will keep plumbing the depths of this experience. But for now, traveling across these places I’ve known that have meant varied things to me through my life, I am blessed to be turning 30. I am freer than I’ve every been.