To Those Who Have Touched My Twenty-One Years of Life But Are No Longer A Part Of It

To those who have touched my twenty-one years of life but are no longer a part of it,

I hope all is well with you. It’s been a while. It could be a month or two. Or maybe over a decade. Either way, hello.

I turned twenty-one this past January. Crazy, I know. I hope you’ve had beautiful birthdays since the last time we’ve spoken. And I hope the years between those birthdays have been beautiful too.

I’m a lot different since I last saw you. I’m learning more about myself every single day. Sometimes it feels like I’m backtracking, or like I don’t know myself at all. But I can’t even say I’m the same person I was a month ago. So I’ve realized it’s okay to get confused by myself every once in a while.

I wanted to write to you for a lot of reasons. To say hi, to reminisce, to say some of the things I never said that I wish I had. But most of all, I wanted to write you to thank you.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my life. About where I’ve left my fingerprints and where I will leave them in the future. I’ve been thinking a lot about all the choices I’ve made and the people I’ve met and how every teeny tiny decision I’ve ever made and every single person I’ve ever interacted with (directly or indirectly) has in some way pushed me into the trajectory my life has taken and will continue to take.

So I want to thank you.

Because in some way, shape or form, you have been a part of my twenty-one years here on earth. Maybe you had been with me since the very beginning. Or maybe, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow so aptly described, we were just two ships passing in the night. Either way, our lives have been intertwined, for no matter how long or short, for good or for bad. And I want to thank you for being a part of it.

1. To the friend who I had my first sleepover with: thank you for letting me leave the hallway light on, it made me feel safer.
2. To the girl who taught me how to make friendship bracelets (and gave me my first one): thank you for being my first true friend.
3. To the person who co-authored my fantastical stories as a child: thank you for fighting the dragons, flying with the faries and helping me bring my ideas to life. You made my childhood enchanting.
4. To the girl who first talked behind my back: thank you for helping me learn the importance of friendship.
5. To the boy who was my first crush: thank you for my first butterflies.
6. To the bus driver who got me to school safely for nine years: thank you for waiting those extra two minutes when we were running late.
7. To the people I rode that same bus with for all those years: thank you for putting up with all the stupid nicknames, coming up with all those silly games and for spending all those miles with me.
8. To the teachers who helped my imagination flourish: thank you for giving me that part, for getting me into that class, for encouraging my ideas and for making my parents happy at all those parent-teacher conferences.
9. To the teachers who always seemed to want to hold my imagination back: thank you for showing me how much I truly appreciate my creativity.
10. To the actors and actresses who acted with me: thank you for helping me nail that spin, for being patient with me when I was learning my lines and for making theatre such an amazing experience.
11. To those who turned me down: thank you for helping me see that rejection isn’t the end of the world.
12. To the kids who were always “too popular” to be my friends: thank you for allowing me to learn to give everyone a chance.
13. To the boy who gave me my first kiss: thank you for making the wait worth it.
14. To the coaches who pushed me to my highest potential: thank you for not giving up on me.
15. To the coaches who underestimated me: thank you for teaching me that I’m more than what others think.
16. To the first person I loved and who loved me back: thank you for opening my heart up and for showing me parts of myself I never saw before.
17. To the friend who I would talk on the phone with until 3AM: thank you for making me know how it feels to laugh until I cry and talk about nothing for hours.
18. To the club that helped me find my passion again: thank you for finding me a home I didn’t know I was missing and giving me a pen so I could write the stories I needed to write.
19. To the person who’s heart I broke: thank you for all of the memories and for letting me go so I could find myself. I’m sorry.
20. To the friends who turned their backs on me: thank you for helping me learn what true friendship means.
21. To the one who listened to me when I wasn’t okay: thank you for asking.
22. To the faces in dorm hallways I would always smile at: thank you for smiling back.
23. To the strangers who’ve complemented my outfit: thank you for making my days brighter.
24. To the people I’ve met at 2AM in pizza parlors: thank you for understanding me.
25. To the strangers who’s stories I’ve heard, no matter how briefly, in gas station rest stops, planes, trains, subway cars and everywhere in between: thank you for allowing me to see a small piece of you; it’s an amazing thing to see.
26. And finally, to the thousands of old versions of me and all the future versions of me that will ultimately leave me: thank you for all the life lessons, the tears, the smiles, for allowing me to look back on my life with happiness and for sacrificing yourself so I can continue to find myself over and over again.

Our lives are touched by hundreds of people every single day. Life is, in essence, a mess of connections, of threads connecting each one of us together in some strange way, shape or form.

I invite you to take the next few minutes to maybe think of someone who you haven’t thought of in a few days, a few months, a few years. And send them a silent thank you for the thread, no matter how frayed or worn, that holds you two together.

 

The Fragility Of Humans

I’d be lying if I told you the last few weeks have been the easiest few weeks of my life. And over these past few weeks, I have felt the raw forms of an assortment of different emotions, some of which I think don’t even have a name.

With everything I have been dealing with, it has felt sometimes like my brain has gone haywire. Suddenly your mind is like a kamikaze pilot, a martyr desperate to prove themselves; your mind turns on itself like a cancer, poisoning every thought to the point where you feel like your eating yourself alive, where you almost seem to relish in the sadness and the anger and the guilt. You are a turncoat, a traitor, your own Judas, your own worst enemy.

There will come times in your life where you feel profound and deep emotion. Pure ecstasy, yes, but also anger that boils your blood so much you might be ashamed of it, and pain so deep it not only surprises you, but numbs you to the core. I guarantee if you haven’t already felt emotions that amaze you by how exceedingly powerful they are, that astonish you because you didn’t know you could even feel that much, it will happen. That is the human experience: there’s no need to be scared by it, because it’s a beautiful thing, really, that we can feel something as pure as emotions.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently, on this idea of emotions, on happiness and sadness. My sophomore year of high school, I struggled a lot with self-confidence and self-image issues. It was an unhappiness I didn’t quite understand, and, much like the unhappiness I mentioned above, it was a dangerous sadness that turned my mind on myself. I often wondered to myself, if happiness was a choice (a statement I now only believe up to a certain extent), why couldn’t I just be happy.

One day I mustered up the courage to confide in a friend that, “No, I actually was not okay.” This was a turning point; I confessed my feelings, expressed my insecurities, and I finally felt free. I had found the path towards happiness and chose it. And it was a rocky road that would take time to walk along, but it didn’t matter because I had come to a fork in the road between happiness and sadness and I had chosen the “right” one.

Ironically, four years later, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I found myself facing a somewhat similar problem once again: here I was, fighting this wave of sadness, all the while saying to myself, why can’t I just be happy.

It might have been because four years ago, I was younger and my emotions were less complicated. Now that I was older, the emotions I was dealing with were more complex, and thus, something I needed to deal with again when I was more mature (a theory I would like to mention, but I personally seriously doubt).

Yes, the complexity of emotions cannot be argued against, but I don’t think this complexity is something that develops over time. Emotions have always been complex and my age has nothing to do with it. When I had dealt with my sadness at 16 years-old, it had been just as complex as the emotions I felt now as a 20-year old woman.

There are two main things I’ve learned so far during this part of my life.

One. There is nothing romantic about sadness. Yes the films and the media, books and stories, they all portray a one-faceted light of what it’s like to suffer; what it’s like to cry and learn, forgive, forget and move-on. But something as complicated as the emotions of a real, breathing, honest-to-god human being, cannot be summed with a movie montage, a clip of our hero having an “a-ha” moment in a thunder-storm, and a quick, happy ending tied up in a red bow.

I don’t want to discredit works of art of this sort: many times these works are based on people’s real life emotions and growing experiences. Thus, they can be important tools for understanding, healing, and learning. There are so many movies and novels that have touched me down to my core, that do, and continue to, inspire and conjure up feelings inside me. But even the most well-executed piece of theatrical production, or the most poignant book, can not completely capture real, raw emotions in the light that they are truly felt.

There is nothing romantic about disease, depression, eating disorders, or self-image issues. There is nothing magical about crying for a loved one you still hope one day will come running through that door again, or learning how to grieve over a broken heart while wondering what it will mean if they choose to never return back. The only thing waiting for a cancer diagnosis is, is scary as all hell.

These are all very real emotions, felt by very real people every single day. They show just how beautiful and absolutely fucking terrible emotions can really be. They are actual problems/feelings that can’t be fixed by simply finding the “right” path and “choosing” to be happy.

Which brings me to my second point.

Two. Anger and happiness, guilt and sadness, and all the feelings in between, all are messy and frustrating. They are unfathomable and simple at the same time. Life is all a huge convoluted, tangled mess that you will spend the rest of your life trying to figure out.

When I was in high school, I mentioned that I had felt like I came to a fork in the road: happy versus sad. And that dealing with my emotions, and learning from them, led me to pick the path for “happiness”.

When you’re faced with sadness, you feel like it has consumed your life; you are dejected, depressed, you are sad. And the same can go for happiness as well; you feel bright and warm and ecstatic, so when you hit that bump of sadness, you’re left wondering, “What happened? I was so happy”.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize. These past few months, I’ve dealt with the worst pain I ever could have imagined (dismal, I know, but it’ll get more cheery). It has left me breathless, confused, dazed, like a visitor in my own body: I don’t wish it on anyone. But the funny thing is, I can sit here and acknowledge that, yes, this is the deepest pain I’ve ever felt in my whole life, I know that. But still, through it all, there are flickers, sparkles and glimmers of happiness.

In the workout I just killed that I could barely finish a month ago, in leaving the office to grab Chipotle with good company and now, good friends. In cracking up and (yes, even shedding tears) to a horribly, wonderful TV show called The Bachelorette. In half crying, half-laughing with my friend on the phone as he told me lines that sounded like they came straight out of a John Green novel (I kid you not, that kid is a genius). From the guy at the gym who told a shrimp like me I was “amazing”, to the humor of a group of girls who were still able to support their tipsy friend who was all the way in Mexico, I felt happiness. And for 3 minutes and 21 seconds, while I sang along to every word of The Spins by Mac Miller, while driving with my windows down along the Long Island coast next to my best friend, I felt euphoric.

Before, I said that I only believed happiness was a choice up to a certain extent.

Sometimes, I think we do get lost in this idea of the “romanticism” of sadness: for some reason some of us can fall into this trap where we relish this sadness and soak in our misery. This is the choice part, when you choose to foster this sorrow and give in to this idea of a “glamorous” sadness.

The choice lies in either cultivating this sadness, or accepting it. Because you sure as hell can’t choose to not feel sad. Sadness happens. For some people, it’s harder than others. But don’t you dare ever tell someone to just be happy.

Happiness, sadness, fear, jealousy: emotions are not states of being. There are no paths or roads, or even choices sometimes. Your feelings do not define you. You are not happy. You are not sad. You are unapologetically you. You are you who feels things in a way unique to all other people and every day you will feel hundreds of different, unique combinations of emotions.

As for me? I am strong, with an even stronger support system behind me. I can be happy when I am sad or angry or hurt. And, if I’m going to be completely honest, I’m really fucking scared. But I’d rather feel all of these things, than nothing at all.

I just want to leave you with the last line of a short story I wrote when I was a senior in high school. It was a story about heartbreak, something I didn’t truly understand at the time, but recently, it has come to mean a lot more to me.

The message I was trying to get across at the time was the idea that pain hurts, it hurts like hell, but the fact that you feel such strong pain, is because you care so much. Because the fact that you feel such strong emotion is because you are human, and that’s what’s beautiful about you.

“The fragility of humans cannot be denied, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”