I’m sure you’ve noticed the theme of these posts lately has leaned heavily on how much lighter I feel these days. Perhaps these posts are part of my process. Sharing with you, sharing for myself. Releasing things into the expanse of the unknown. Saying things out loud. Writing it out to read over and over.
Each day - each experience, feels like a reclamation of the person ‘teenage me’ wanted to be when she thought she knew it all. Maybe I did know it all, just without the tools to pull it off the right way. Or maybe the trick to a satisfying life is to make the mistakes, take the hits, survive the misfortune, and then turn the story around all on your own.
And then there’s the the little winks from the universe signaling that you’ve made it… at least for now..like Tails & Trails not only covers the bills and the mortgage, but also allows me a few stolen hours of “pretend vacation” every day. Nothing like slipping away to an empty pool at an apartment complex full of students where everyone who resides there is tucked away in class or at work while I’ve got the turquoise expanse all to myself. Sometimes I float and giggle, because for a few hours in the middle of an ordinary weekday, I’ve learned how to reward myself resort-style afternoons on the reg. The layout of the pool hides the parking lot, so I pretend there’s a beach just beyond those hedges and under that blue sky. All that’s missing is my cabana boy ;)
Back home, the dogs keep their own rituals. Poptart insists on hose time each afternoon, while Reece prefers the hammock, stationed like a sentinel guarding the farm. He would happily stay out there all night if I let him. Every evening, we go through the same tug-of-war… me coaxing him inside while he digs in his heels. Sometimes I wish I could let him win, just to see what he’d do under the moonlight, but with all the wildlife out here, I can’t chance it. Reece has somehow managed to avoid getting skunked all these years when my other dogs haven’t been so lucky…
Growing up kinda poor turned out to be its own education. Of course at the time I didn’t see it that way, but now I can see it taught me to be scrappy, creative, resourceful - skills that still serve me. It taught me that freedom tastes sweeter when you’ve had to claw for it. I look around and see how a lot of people my age are parenting differently than previous generations, shielding their kids from the word ‘no’. And I can’t help but think that’s part of why so many young adults are drifting. No hunger, no push to figure it out on their own - because they’ve never had to…
But that’s a tangent for another day. What I keep circling back to is how lucky I feel to have found my hunger early, and how good it feels to honor it now. When I turned 18, I bolted out of the house that very day. I even got a tattoo THAT DAY. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to prove to myself that I could. That streak of rebellion turned out to be autonomy in disguise.
Now here I am, years later, relearning the same lesson… that independence, in all its awkward and uncomfortable firsts, is what makes me feel most alive. That this life - messy, quiet, stitched together with small rituals and stubborn hope, is mine. Entirely mine. Independence is about belonging fully to yourself, to where you’ve landed, to your own hard-won peace. And in this season of firsts, that feels like the truest homecoming of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment