a brand new, sparkling thing
who doesn't love glitter?
My chocolate strawberry TruFrus are slowly melting in the sticky heat of a Texas night, a mosquito is sucking the dear life out of my ankle despite my highly-rated citronella candle (at least someone has a sick obsession with me) and I should definitely be showered and in bed by now. But…
I have been craving this moment for a few foggy years. Years where I put off writing regularly because life was, to be candid, suspiciously good. And when life is that good, the last thing you (I) want to do is sit down at a laptop, tune out the world, and begin the work of digging deep into your (my) heart for something meaningful and potentially earth-shattering to say that won’t totally pull you away from your so-called fabulous life.
At 23, I was a vision of constant, doe-eyed bliss and it’s undecided as to whether this was, in the long run, a factually good thing. This is to say, writing—in one way or another—demands inconvenient, honest reflection, which is the exact opposite of what a doe-eyed, blissful person does but that is who I wanted to be.
During this fluffy, fizzy, spritzy phase of my early twenties, there were countless gratitude lists I passed off as writing. Anecdotes in my Notes app. Afternoons spent laughing at the grocery store, nights like the one on the racetrack, and so many times in between when I made it a point to tell myself, “Do not forget this moment. Write it all down. It’s a good one.” Playlists made, photos taken, and an ongoing, natural high that made a scrambled egg in the morning seem like the single most exciting thing to exist. Living, purely experiencing life with minimal pause was what that time required and I was happy to oblige.
There was a lot of love. There still is. My life isn’t all of a sudden not good. But the haze of being deep-in-the-trenches in love can be so thick that if you’re not careful, has the power to sway you and swaddle you into becoming the type of person that never ends up doing the things they’ve always said they wanted to do. I’m sure that turns out okay for some people. For others, I imagine it’d be quite the opposite.
This is not to blame the people we love or even the love itself, but the effect that that kind of love can have on our individuality, our growth, and whether we even care for either as much now that we’ve got the love part down. A much-welcomed check on life’s running list. A comfortable home where we may or may not tend to leave our dreams (not all, just the faraway ones) at the door. Those may bring extra mess in. Questions. Uncertainty.
Some people say that when you’re with the right person, you will feel challenged every day to do better. To be better.
In my humble-ish opinion, this is half-true and half…how you say…straight rubbish. I believe a large portion of the “be better” part is singularly up to us—you, me, not “we.” And when we decide we want to try our hand at that thing, it is ideal that our partners support us and maybe even inspire us in the best way they can, but that is as far as it can go until it inevitably becomes a joint effort; no longer something special that we hold close to our chests, a not-so-secret secret just for us. A passion project (unironically), a sport, a pursuit: party of one.
The point of me telling you this is not to spark some global revolution to stake a claim on your sense of self while your significant other is just trying to get you to turn the lights off and come to bed already. (Although I have some flags around here somewhere.) It’s to A. Maybe shed a teeny-tiny baby ray of light that I wish I had seen sooner and B. Provide a good-enough excuse as to why I haven’t been writing and I know no excuse is really good enough but I figure this one had a leg and a half because at least the reason had to do with love. Love is typically as good a reason as any.
Note that this message applies evenly, relationship or not.
This is the result of me redirecting that love, at least in one of the ways I know how. I’m 25 years old and I have a lot of thoughts that are absolutely, positively clawing at me to let them out and put them into words. So I will. Weekly musings-meets-stream of consciousness on life, love, womanhood, and quarter-life crises in sushi restaurant parking lots. Book talks, face oil reviews, no-stick sticky bras, and how to hide your trash can in that ultra-chic kind of way. Tommy Shelby, movie podcasts, and the healing properties of a well-curated Spotify queue. That one tortellini soup recipe you’ll have to pry out of my cold, wrinkly hands someday because I’m never going to not use it. America’s (possibly the universe’s) best lip gloss. The whole sitch. All of it—big and (seemingly) small.