Typical Tuesday- I'm Like Totally a Sorority Girl Now

As far as I can tell from my six month stint as a Texas resident, the only three things that anyone can be sure about around here is that the weather will change every single day, saying "bless your heart" will never be a sentiment of endearment, and when it comes to college, greek life dominates. The tour guides try to say otherwise, throwing out statistics to try and make people feel like going to school here isn't just about sorority and frat row. I was warned, but I didn't believe what they said. What did someone mean when they said greek life would be all in my face? That seemed like something a bitter GDI would say. Then I spent the entire first semester watching the older girls wear their pins and jerseys, sit together in classes, and go to all the cool events. It seemed like one giant exclusive party, and I could only stand and press my face up to the window and hope some day I would be put on the invite list.

Then recruitment happened, and it was one of the strangest weeks of my life. Why do my Rho Gammas always look constipated? Why do they insist on calling me PNM #33? What does give your heart to Chi O and she'll give it back to you even mean? My experience wasn't anything out of the horror stories you hear through the grape vine, but I'm here to say it happens. There should be a correction to that hackneyed saying: all's fair in love and war- and rush. Somehow I made it through the process in one piece, with only two.. okay, maybe three hysterical meltdowns. Rush is just like that though. It gets in your head and you feel this insatiable urge to be everything you think you deserve to be. Everyone says you end up where you are supposed to, and for better or worse maybe that's true. Even if it doesn't work out how you thought, I like to believe that there was an upper hand guiding you home. The truth is though, if you end up in a house, it's hard to not feel the connection when you're being showered in gifts and told how much everyone loves you. The brainwashing is real. I don't know if that's the best way to phrase it though. To me it feels like stepping across the threshold into that exclusive party, and after you enter you never can go back. Nobody on the outside really can understand, and it's beyond explanation. Sorority life is simply ineffable.

Reality, sometimes it's not all it's cracked up to be

Some day, I'll be living in this big ole city....

One of the saddest moments in life is realizing that everything that made up the dimensions of your universe is gone. Sometimes I forget I have a support system at all. I feel like there is just me, and I am all by my lonesome. The truth is that's how it is. I don't have my sister here to brush my wet hair, so I work out the snarls all by myself. I don't have a mother to walk with me and listen to me talk about my problems, so I don't talk about them. I don't have a father to eat breakfast with me, so now I just eat my muffin alone. I don't have a golden retriever to cuddle with me when I'm alone, so now I don't cuddle. I don't even have my best friends to be with, so I constantly feel like I am walking through my life having experiences that are entirely worthless because I'm alone. Of course I'm not alone, but what's the difference really if you don't feel supported or loved? All I have are these overpriced textbooks to love me, and they don't. That's the problem with putting all of your investments in one place, when it fails you are left with nothing.
I'm not scared of being alone in a big city. Most of my childhoods fears don't plague me any longer. I'm not scared of flying by myself, or talking to people on the phone. I'm comfortable arguing with adults when it is justified, and taking cabs by myself. I know how to cook basic meals, and I can successfully take care of myself. I have so much to be grateful for. I was given the privilege of being offered a wide open space to try and make a new life for myself. For this I was always grateful, until the day my parents moved the last of the furniture into the room and said it was time to go. In that moment I realized that space was highly overrated. The one lesson I have managed to grasp in Economics is the concept of opportunity cost, that with every decision you give up the next best option. The opportunity cost of going away for college was much, much, higher than I anticipated. So high that I have a feeling if I had known it would have been nearly impossible to force me to go. I suppose that is why no one tells you the truth about these things. The only thing that I really am truly afraid of anymore is never being happy. What if this is as good as it gets? What if this is the "good life?" Me standing awkwardly at clubs watching other people drink and be merry, and all the while wishing I was at home watching Downton Abbey with my parents. Obviously most people will think I'm lame. But I don't think anyone can really understand until you find yourself alone in a 12 by 12 room and realize that you live in a building of 300 eighteen year old kids who have no idea what the hell they are doing with their life, and are all making ridiculous mistakes in the process of finding out. Some nights are better than others. Sometimes I look out at the city lights of Dallas and I feel so free and liberated, like I'm living out what Taylor Swift sang in Mean-   Some day  I'll be living in a big ole city, and all you're ever going to be is mean. Now that it is fall and all the leaves are changing I find myself thinking:

Now I know why all the trees change in the fall, I know you were on my side even when I was wrong, and I love you for giving me your eyes and standing back and watching me shine.

This is the end...

...of an era. This marks the end of my carefree summer and indicates the transition in my life from high school to college. I'm terrified because I don't know what my future holds for me. I couldn't tell you how anything will work out and I'm scared to find out. At the same time it's frighteningly wonderful, because I've begun to discover that some of the most beautiful moments in life are the unpredicted ones. I learned this summer that the difference between being upset and being happy is entirely perspective. It seems obvious that how I chose to view my life makes a huge impact on how I feel about it, but the application of this is incredible. The lesson is that there is always a bright light waiting for you anywhere you go. The destination is almost irrelevant in light of what you choose to make of it. My predicted path was not very accurate at all, as many of the ideas I had of who I should be were not fulfilled. Some of this was within my realm of control and some of it was definitely not. Regardless, I can sit here and say today I've become even more of the person I'm meant to be despite the disappointment a and let downs. So many of the tumultuous struggles ended up resolving themselves and led me to feel I'm embarking on a journey that's leading me to all the bigger goals in my life. I've said it before, but not getting what you want makes you just as happy as getting something you want does. It's all based off of how you take the current situation and run with it. Holding a grudge for people who accomplished your dreams is absurd, because that no longer matters. If you don't achieve your old dreams, that just means you outgrew them and need to make some new ones. We can never be more than we are. The end of high school showed me its okay if I'm not the smartest or the prettiest or the most athletic. I'm going to keep struggling with those issues in my life forever, but the more time goes on the more I can roll my eyes at my silliness. I'm a legal adult now and intend to begin attempting to act in a way that suggests I am what I want to be. I'm going to be a powerful woman and no one is going to stop me. Now to lift my invisible champagne glass and toast the past. Thank you to all the people who crossed my path and taught me humbling lessons about love, loss, and adolescent stupidity. To everyone who I have loved, I will hold them in my heart forever. And here's to this new chapter of my life on the hilltop in the Big D. Many beautiful flowers blossom from unexpected places.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Hello from a plane to the rest of my life. Do you ever find yourself going somewhere and not even fully understand why you are going? I believe it begins with the concept that we can never predict the future, that we never really know where we are going or where we will end up. We just act from the desire to find inner fulfillment and sometimes I don't even really think we know why we crave what we do. I just read the most profound sentence in the book I'm reading. It said "Maybe he didn't live in the past, but the past lived in him." I think that the past lives in us until we don't remember it anymore, and even then we will feel the way we feel and just don't remember why that is. We are made up of all the events of our life that shaped us into the person we have become, and while often it is difficult to acknowledge we become all that we were, it happens regardless. I suppose at some point I made the decision that I wanted to leave my life. So that's what I'm doing. As it is written, You must give up the life you had planned in order to live the one that is waiting for you.

I Digress because I'm Sad

I think it is an interesting fact of life that it makes all of us feel so much better when someone we aren't close to tells us something compared to your best friend or your family. I guess we all believe that the people closest to us have to love us regardless of the instances where we screw up or fail, whereas a random person does not owe us anything. When a guy I don't know tells me I'm pretty it suddenly has so much more credibility, because he has no motive or anything to gain behind telling me the truth. When people we are just getting close to tell us to remember that we are amazing it just feels so much warmer. They don't have to say those things, they do it because they want to and they believe it to be true.

I know I'm in a stuck place when I can't sleep at night, because my brain pounds and not in a migraine way, just a fuzzy way. Like there is no definitions or lines drawn and there is no certainty involved. I wish I knew how to make rejection hurt less. I wish I knew how to stop feeling emotions when emotions aren't worth their weight. The truth is there are things I think that no one knows. Maybe because I know when I say them out loud it will sound silly, or fall upon deaf ears, or just enter into the vortex of things I've said that lost their meaning. That doesn't make them any less true thought does it... Sometimes I wish I could be honest free of the editing I do to spare people. I came to a conclusion the other day about why the summer I spent at Stanford was the best time of my life so far. I realized that it was because those people didn't know me, they didn't know that I was actually over emotional, or a snoopy person, I can't eat sushi with chopsticks, that I run my mouth unchecked, or that I wasn't in the top ten of my class. All they saw was a shell of me, and they really valued me for that version of myself. I felt free from the expectations that I find pressed upon me at school. There was no one that I had to stand next to and feel small beside, no one that thought I talk with double meaning or sassy undertones, and no one to say I was insignificant. Maybe I was insignificant, maybe I always have been. That month was the first time however that people thought I was the best at something. I was the one who brought my best guy friend along and could perfectly curl hair. It wasn't that I thought I was the best person ever, but I just never get to feel like that at home. When I'm here I always feel stuck in the middle, somewhere between invisible and like last season's Tory burch flats. When I look around I gaze out onto a scene of people interacting, and it isn't that I don't feel I belong, it's that I don't want to. I've never felt like anyone's minion, nor anyone's leader. I just wake up in the morning with a very defined sense of who I am and where I want to be. I know the clothes I like and which ones I don't, and I put a lot of emphasis on outward appearances remaining in a poised and composed fashion. What makes me laugh (even though it isn't laugh out loud funny) is that when I get upset, I always tell myself I'm tired of putting on the brave face and waking up the next morning and putting on the eyeliner just like everything is peachy keen. Every time though, even when I tell myself I'm really going to let everything go, I always still pull it together and fix myself some tea and put on my lipgloss. I can't find it in myself to quit. In the midst of winter I found within me an invincible summer.

While I'm on the topic of feeling small, another thing that has always bothered me is that people never remember who I am. I ask myself, do I not have a memorable face? Is it that I'm boring when I talk? Or is it about something I can't see in myself when I look at the reflection in the mirror. It makes me feel even smaller than my actual frame when my life is a constant line of being called a nickname that doesn't fit me or just not remembering my name at all. It's dumb.. I know. I've just always been curious why I didn't stick out. I know I'm just a white girl with no striking features, but I just thought my footprints left a mark where I walked instead of blowing dust to the wind.

What I Thought in the Past..

It always seems like we never remember anything more than what is right in front of us. Is it really human nature to forget, for the very essence of who we are to dissolve and dissapate from our thoughts with nothing more than the alleving powers of time? Days pass whether we count them or not, and even on the mornings where it seems questionable whether your world will continue to roll on, the sun has never failed to rise over the mountains in the east and fade again that evening over the palm trees in the west. Each day itself holds the potentail to be more than one more Monday in the earthly span of worst days of the week.

Some mornings I lie tangled in silky sheets, worry blanketing over my eyes, clawing in the dark to figure out why I should rise from my cozy cocoon of safety. Then I see it. I see it all. I see a maroon gown that swallows me up, and loosely curled hair, and antsy smiles with glossed lips nervously fidgeting with my painted fingers while waiting to hear my name. I see that moment when I rip off the matching maroon cap ladeled with honor tassles, and toss it into the May moonbeam lit night air in the unified symbol of the end, that all of the nothing was never really nothing at all. I see that day in December when I walk to the mailbox, shivering in a sweater and clutching the mail key anxiously in one hand. The moment when I twist the door to the mailbox and I see a innocuous yellow envelope, and how I will sink to the ground with triumphant tears of joy for the toil of four years of sadness. I see a future with autumn leaves, and vivid reds and yellows that remind us that losing everything can be the most beautiful part of all. I see a young lady who still goes by Miss but won't for long, squeezing hands tightly with a young man who's love dismisses all her fears.

 We hold on so tightly to whatever it is that makes us feel safe that we lose the value of the unforeseeable. High school will be over soon. No more will the same ecletic group of individuals parade the halls, no longer will the best friends laugh in the corner or the enemies bicker behind gray desks of academia. There will be no more early release pazooki eating or laughable group projects, no more Homecomings with ill fitting bodices and painful heels. There won't even be going home to a house filled with comforting yellow light and a hot plate of food served next to the side of parental love and guidance. That all will come to an end soon enough, and that's something we all have to accept. Look around and notice that the people you see do not match their image in your memory. We all change, in all the right and wrong ways. Maybe the haircuts and T-shirt choices have improved, and the teeth are all less crooked but the minds will never be the same shade of pure innocent white, unscarred by the bitterness and acidity of youth. The big issues always seemed less important than the small ones, then one day it flips beneath you and getting invited to parties and being accepted and owning the right brand of shoes gets replaced with decisions that impact the rest of your life. Maybe it makes us mad that metamorphasis transpired all around us and we never noticed until it was too late. Maybe the people and way you get used to isn't always going to be that way, but all the best parts of life are fleeting. The truth is we have to forgive each other for growing up. It's just like the leaves of fall, let them drop down around us, each leaf like a memory, whether it be success or failure. The best moment is right before we lose it all.

Now is the Start

The path through the pain is forward, to a future filled with corcuscating sunsets

As much as we all like to think we control our own destinies and actions, I feel like a part of us all knows we have limited control over everything. When you do the same things for four years with slight variation as you grow and mature, it becomes hard to imagine the life we don’t know that awaits us behind the veil of misty smoke and clouds. Maybe the truth is it was never so much about the rejection letters from schools as it was that we aren't prepared to go off to college. I think we’ve always known that fact and we just do our very best to deny it. Everyone wants to go to college right? Maybe I don’t. Maybe I don’t belong in a state five hours by plane away from the warmth of family and the soothing knowledge that my mother who loves me so so much will always be there to love me a little more. That Friday when I didn’t get in to what we shall refer to as *dream school*, when I held that rejection letter in my cold shaking hands and when I sobbed so hard that all the mascara just streamed down my face in a very Taylor Momson when Chuck takes her virginity way, my mom held me and it made it okay. I still cry when I think about that day, because it honestly sucked. Maybe when there is more certainty in the solution of the matterr it will stop making me cry. Or maybe it never will. 

It will always serve as a defining day in my life in which that which I had dreamed for myself came crashing down upon my shoulders. In a way, I feel like it was the nudging hand of God shaking his head at me and pointing out that all of the objects of my desires are painfully misguided. I feel like I know what I want, but at the same time sometimes I find myself realizing I’m not who I always imagined myself to be. Today in the the lululemon dressing room, there was one of those three way mirrors that allows you to see yourself from all different views, and I looked at the girl and judged her and then took a long moment to realize that girl was me. Then I just stared at her side profile and tried to imagine other people loving that shell of a body as my soul. All I really feel in touch with is my own mind, and the wavering thoughts that flicker through my brain, and I don’t really know that body. It is mine but at the same time it just allows me to function. I’ve been wrong so much this past year that I honestly believe I’m in a sort of redefinition of all the boundaries and lines I’ve drawn. 

 On a slightly different note, I've begun to consider why it is we always return to the subjects and people who cause us the most suffering. Why is there love lost between some people even when those very people are the reason for pain in our lives? Can we not let go because there is unfinished business, or is it that when you love unconditionally you don’t give up even when the object of your affections is begging you to. There is a legitimate point when someone I know pondered to me why we always return to the people who hurt us most. I thought it over and think it makes logical sense. We return to that which makes us feel alive. Maybe life with those things that hurt us is more painful, or dangerous, but no one would keep going back if they didn’t like the way that thing made them feel.