Breath in. Breath through. Breathe deep. Breathe out.
If you close your eyes, you can imagine snow falling inside your apartment. Everything you touch turns to gold. Every person you love loves you back. Every thought you have is sound and funny and intelligent. Every word you say drips of honey and perfection. There’s a light always shining, and you are simply magic.
“I want to feel more hopeful, like everything is working out for me.”
I wrote those words in my journal back in January. It’s almost December now.
Reflecting on my urge to discover and cling to hope makes me realize that everything happens for a reason, even when it feels like I’ve never been lower. The bad parts of life – the ones I avoid or talk shit about or always remain in every background of my life – mixed with the good ones allow everything to fall into place so things would eventually work out for me. It’s regression to the mean.
However, those bad parts don’t always go away just because there is more good in my life at this moment in time. Maybe they don’t go away because they serve a purpose and are meant to stick around for a while. Or, maybe I internalize it and permanently inject it into my bloodstream until I flush it out with saline like the nurses at the hospital do.
Letting go, or at least having a looser grip, has always been a difficult concept for me. It’s a gift to be able to move on and get over, but it’s a gift I’ve kept the receipt for and tried to return multiple times. Sometimes, if not most, letting go is so we can free ourselves.
I think I’ve begun to feel freer recently. Every morning for the past week I’ve sat on the floor of my living room and just existed. I’ve begun journaling three pages every morning. I write without feeling guilty of my emotions because the emotions people don’t always describe as positive are just as important to feel as the positive ones. Once I hit the right margin of the last line of my third page for the day, I close the journal shut. I don’t reread and relive (anymore).
It’s easy to get war flashbacks. Sometimes they’re fun, like when you get home and replay your first kiss over and over in your head. Sometimes they are humiliating and terrifying, like sending that text you tell yourself was a drunk text but you actually only had half of a vodka cranberry.
It’s especially easy to reread and relive when these journal entries are things I eventually bring up in therapy and thrust me into a 20-minute lecture about why I need to think before I speak (or press send).
But there is so much to feel. We think we’ve felt it all until something or someone new comes along. So much can hold remnants of our emotions, like D.I.Y. horcruxes. Our feelings are so valuable that immortalization seems perfect. Maybe taking pen to paper is how we do it because it shows us that what we’re writing is so important to us in the moment, it’s our whole life story. Then one day, it becomes a book in a series. Then, a chapter, Then, a few pages. Then, a paragraph. Then, a sentence. Maybe our feelings have half-lives. They’ll always be around, even in their smallest forms, to prove we actually lived the emotionally saturated life everyone should.
And after you think and you feel and you react, there’s a point in time when you sit on the floor of your living room with Taylor Swift playing (it’s folklore or evermore, or maybe even Midnights (her stoner album), so you know you’re being chill and lowkey), and you just look around, eyes adjusting to the dimmed lights while you think, “I am really enjoying me and my life right now.” And yeah, maybe it’s the day after that guy ghosted you and maybe that one brand accidentally slipped THC into their CBD ingestibles, but I think those thoughts and feelings are all the same.
Tender is the flesh, fragile is the soul. I’m scared to hold on, I’m scared to let go.
One day, all of the resentment for that one girl you knew in high school goes away and the embarrassment you felt for breaking things off with the only guy who told you he like-liked you when you were a teenager diminishes because it doesn’t matter. There’s something new to feel now.
It’s like chalk on the driveway before it gets washed away by rain. It’s like footprints in the snow before it melts. It eventually goes away, so you have space to be new again.
If you close your eyes and let yourself, you can feel. You can feel anything and everything because it’s okay. No one ever says it, but it’s okay to simply feel what you do without worrying about anything else.
Even if your sister rolls her eyes and snarkily says, “Real mature.”
