Letting go

I was 14 when I decided I was going to be a Social Worker. In hindsight it seems like a pretty strange decision to make as a young teenager but I guess some needs are so deep that when there is no other way, we are forced to meet them ourselves. I was as longing to be saved, as I was to save others.

Ten years on and I am a qualified social worker who has just quit my first “real” job after only four months. The job that I had dreamt about and worked towards relentlessly for ten solid years. Less a job and more of a vocation. I was made to be a social worker and because of this every shitty experience I’d ever had was okay because I was training. Gaining valuable experience for my future self. Every experience I’d wished I’d had would be fulfilled through these beautiful, cathartic moments where I would become the person for these kids that I had always longed for myself.

In reality the four months were hell. Weeks and weeks filled with sleepless nights, debilitating stress and an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the daily pursuit for hope. I’ve never felt like I couldn’t do something before but leaving this job was not a choice, it was necessity. And just when I’d had my life all neatly tied up with a bow at last, it came undone. And the whole fucking mess came spilling out. When I quit my “dream job” I lost not only the ideas I’d had about my career but the ideas I had about myself too. That I was capable and strong and tenacious. A social worker. A wounded healer.

Life is funny like that, isn’t it? We can plan with precision and care how the entirety of our lives will pan out but it is as useful as a daydream. I am quickly sobering in my new found knowledge; that my life may never look like I thought it would. That our lives rarely do and that there is beauty in that. That our real character will be shown in how we faced the challenges and the U-turns, not how we predicted them. In how we were able to grow and adapt to our changing surroundings. In how we were able to hope, amongst our pain and our dying dreams.

Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life were mistakes. Completely unplanned, unpredictable moments and chances which I am thankful for everyday. Life really is more complex and more creative than we could ever comprehend and it is our responsibility to ensure we never limit ourselves to our own imaginations. I might get a new social work job and continue my career or I might not. I might be a teacher or a writer. I might not be the person I thought I was going to be but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying. We don’t always have to succeed to win. Success won’t always look like we’d imagined but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.

Sometimes the greatest strength is not in how hard we hold on, but in how gracefully we can let go.

Making my bed

I’m 23 years old, 24 at the start of the new year. I work as a barista in a coffee shop, in a job I neither hate nor love. I’m at a place in my life where I’m neither happy nor unhappy. Not anxious, not depressed or heartbroken, not broken at all and yet not happy either. I suppose I always believed that happiness was just the opposite of unhappiness. I work in a job that I believe uses less than 10% of my creativity or skill as a person and maybe even less of my attention. That brings me no closer to who I really am or that lets me explore that. One of my new years resolutions for 2016 was to stop working dead end jobs and I am really no further than when the year began. And the more I settle into this routine the more I think that there are two types of people in the world, people who are content with this kind of life and people who aren’t. The people who will get out and the people who never do.

So I made a list. 25 things I want to do before I’m 25. Things which range from learning to play my banjo better to learning how to drive. The smallest most insignificant things like making my bed every morning, because that what I thought successful people did, to

Number 12 on my list: Climb Black Mountain (03/10/2016)

getting my dream job within the next year. Because those people who are neither happy nor unhappy, the ones who live largely unfulfilling lives, the ones we all know and think we will never become, they were just us once. Just some 23 year old girl with a degree she wasn’t using, writing some amateur blog and thinking about how far away those dreams seem in reality.

But you don’t need to be the person you want to become tomorrow. That’s the kind of thoughts that keep people immobilized. That its too far away, it’s too hard, its too unrealistic. It probably is. You don’t need to get your dream tomorrow if that’s not actually feasible. You can only get there when you get there. You just need to take small steps in the right direction. You just need to do one small thing that brings you towards it everyday. You don’t need to write a novel, you just need to keep writing. You just need to keep your dreams in your sight.

All you have to do today, is make your bed.

Here comes the summer

I can still remember that day as clear as ever. Taking the ferry from the North Fork to Shelter Island for the first time. I wore a white top and denim shorts, had a cowboy hat on and sunglasses which always hurt the sides of my head. Like they were begging me not to miss that moment. I’ve played it again and again in my head. I had my feet perched up against the glove compartment, resting neatly in place of the steering wheel.

We were strangers then, all of us but somehow the silence never felt awkward. Would it have scared me then to know how attached I would one day become. Would I have regretted the constant inscription of you etched around my right ankle, almost as real as the sound of your voice across a crowded dining hall. This is the problem with travelling you see, it doesn’t just broaden your mind, it stretches your soul. It leaves pieces of it scattered under the coconut trees in puerto rico, or buried below the sand at K-rock with our old cigarette butts.

If I knew then how much I stood to gain and lose on that tiny island, would I have turned back. Would I have rewinded it back to my first night, drinking cocktails in your back garden, arguing with your dad that true love exists. That I’d felt it, I’d lived it. Or back to the night we skinny dipped at k-rock, back to them nights on the roof watching the sun come up. So free. So free it was almost frightening.

Or maybe back to the first night at camp. Would I be willing to give up this me for an easier ride. Would I be able to say no, say I’d meet you another time, down by the waterfront or at the drinks machine queue. Would I place my hand over yours, close that gap on the sofa, fast forward the inevitable. Would I take the bus out with you to chase that thunderstorm, you always were braver than me friend. Or maybe I would just get drunk with some friends, watch a girl in cowboy boots get sloppy. Enjoy the details my mind may someday not remember.

This is our first summer since that day apart. Sure we’ll see eachother but it won’t be the same. It won’t ever be that first day. It won’t ever be that first ferry ride, silently gazing across the still water. So unsure about what this adventure would hold. So unaware of the effects of that small patch of land on our lives and so ignorant of the potential a group of “20 something year old kids” might hold.

ps Bryan, this ones for you..