Late 20.

Excuse my long silence.

It’s 05:30. My eyes reluctantly peel open into consciousness; I stay on my back and wait… but nothing. The dark has not come for me today, dread isn’t fluttering over my stomach before taking over my body. Gloom has released me from its hold, the light outside is suddenly the light within, and I have somehow survived my mind. Life’s transitions can be as simple as witnessing an erupting butterfly, as devastating as the loss of a loved one, as magical as a new baby, as necessary as a tired soul’s protest.

Nobody warns you about the big bus that hits you in the late 20’s. How the adolescent coping mechanism of your early 20’s will turn into inadequate scaffolding under the demands of adult life. How your relationship with your parents will have to change if you do not want to inherit their ghosts.  

Nobody warns you about waking up to a deep sense of unfulfilled potential. I am grateful for everything I have accomplished by God’s grace so far. I also acknowledge that this bountiful harvest of progress cannot be sacrificed at the altar of ‘Whats Next’. But there are also parts of me that feel unlived, and I hadn’t been honest about that disappointment. The best lies are the ones we tell we tell ourselves. Like the rift between two cliffs, I was experiencing the distance between the ideologies I hold about my life and my actual daily reality.

What do we do with the unbuild dreams, and the roofless careers? How do we admit, ’This is not how I thought it would be’? But even more frightening, how do we make new dreams at our big age?

Sometimes I am Adam in the garden and God is asking ‘where are you’, not as a point of judgment but as a call to consciousness and accountability.

When the clouds parted, and the light without was the light within, I realised that my work is in honoring my younger self and the choices she made with what information she had. She got me here.  My work is dreaming out what can still be and navigating towards that future fiercely. I am to never wage war against myself.

My job is in choosing the daily habits that cement the life I believe I was created to live, accepting time’s hand, accepting love. Sometimes it’s as small as switching off the TV for a book, or as big as a career change. It’s doing the things I say I will do and forgiving myself quickly when I don’t.

I am taking full shape, gently breaking into new skin, proud of every stretch mark.