I wrote this at the start of 2022, a couple of months before my 25th birthday. It’s my victory march, a song shouting and cementing all of my hard-fought joys that I’m still living in and loving through today.
Looking back at my writing over the years before this was written, it’s clear that, on the whole, I was angry and very scared. Those writings were an attempt to declare some variety of independence, over and over until it stuck. This piece, written after a one-year writing hiatus - during which I was busy drawing new lines in the sand and living the wonderful God-breathed life within them - is like my Emancipation Proclamation or newly written Constitution. Since its writing, my years have been so so good, and I hope I’m back to document them here.
I won’t say much more now because I think I already said it best then, but, in summary, the words below are the culmination of the hardest fights I ever fought, which by the grace of God were truly won.
Gosh, hi. I’m writing this as a 1-year and 2 days later follow-up to my last post. I didn’t write last year like I said I would, but I did manage to make last year glorious. It was glory-filled. Like the glory I’d put on layaway was finally paid in full (payment made complete by 2019 and 2020’s outrageous acuteness) and made its way to me. The emotional supply chain bottleneck of my life had righted itself.
As I’d written, my 23rd year did flop a bit. It was hard and it was heavy and I learned a bit too much about myself, too much to hold in both hands and one heart. But when my mom wrote in my 24th birthday card that she recalled 24 as her favorite year, (and my mom being my lighthouse for all of life’s things) I decided I’d make it mine too. And by deciding to live the most fully and deeply, and authentically I ever have, it has been. I’d lived the 22 and 23-year-old lessons enough that I could actually implement them when the 24-year-old tests came. Hallelujah, we’re growing over here.
At the start of 2021, I wrote down some paradigms, not resolutions, to guide my year. These were the 22 and 23-year-old lessons distilled down to memorizable phrases I could take with me. These were the words written on the stone tablet of my heart - store them up and don’t depart from them. In summary:
Throw away the social mirror - not everyone gets to judge you
Love your life and don’t be a bitch to yourself - you’ll live through many things before you understand them
Keep the admission fee to your life very high - not everyone gets to have access to you
So as it would seem, much of my life’s malady stemmed from selling too many tickets at too low a price to watch the “becoming me” storyline unfold (paradigms #1 and #3) and then being pissed at myself for doing so once I’d realized (paradigm #2) but also being too fearful of judgment to change anything about it (paradigm #1 again). A whole mess.
So what’d it look like when I threw the whole thing together? When I walked the walk through the hell and highwater that inevitably still came, because that’s just what we like to get up to on this side of Heaven? There were wonderfully high notes like getting engaged and buying a home, but those were supported and made possible by myriad smaller decisions strung together into a chorus of “no”s. As if regressing back to the pre-new-millennial version of me who was learning her voice and the sounds she could use to communicate with it, I re-learned the joy and power of a boundary cemented with “no.” Because that’s really all those paradigms are saying, right? The river running through it led me to a big old “stop this shit, Nads.” Thankfully I’ve built on those toddler lessons and learned that the “no” that produces the most peace is the one that’s acted, not spoken. Perform your boundaries to make them real, and find your life within them.
So last week when I took stock of this year’s progress and big moments, what littered the page wasn’t the high notes (though they're wonderful and I’m so grateful, believe you me) - it was the written acknowledgments that I’d cut ties, that I’d advocated for myself, that I embraced grace, boldness, and vulnerability in the same breaths, and in doing so, ultimately, sang a resounding “hell no” in the face of all the things I’d insisted on loving unrequitedly. I built a tidy little fence around my love and my peace and hung up a sign that said “Try it if you want to, but I’m not interested.”
So much for that and so much for the growth and joy that’s compounding every day. Thank goodness because there’s beaucoup left to store up while I gear up for a quarter-life reimagining (crisis?) in two months. Onwards and upwards and upwards some more, like flights of angels leading us to some good rest, but without any tragedy, we aren’t able to handle.