All I Need

For most days, what we need is fairly basic. Sleep, food, water. But what we actually do with our time is so much greater than that. Work, invest, care. There are these characters that plant a seed in your life and grow into something more, into something profoundly meaningful.

The weight of time bears down on me more and more every day. I feel like there are all these important things that I should be doing but for some reason, I am just not doing them. Not writing more, not learning to play the guitar or piano, not volunteering, not working out, not being enough of a person that is growing. I am stagnant. I get up and get what is necessary but I am not really thriving.

I have the energy to thrive but am not. I am a plant that is neither dying nor growing. Just taking in the sun.

And what I keep asking myself every single day: what is it going to take for me to really thrive? How do I get there? Who will stick with me along the way?

I wake up every day with a subtle reminder in my brain that I am on a timer. A time that will eventually run out. And when it does, what will I have left with the world that made it better? And how can I make as much an impact as possible with the limited time counting down?

I heard once on that "Dying is easy. Living is hard." I didn't get it at the time but now I do. Once I became an adult, I felt the pressing need to do something important. Something that mattered. And I don't feel like I am. And I go to bed every day feeling like I wasted another day that I could have done something important. I am 27 and feel like I need to do more. And how has yet to be revealed to me. Or perhaps the when is simply up to me to decide to do it.

My mom tells me that having me was her greatest accomplishment, that my searching for something more won't necessarily yield some profound revelation. I want to disagree with her. I want children to be one of my accomplishments. I don't want them to be my primary accomplishment. I want them to be one of many.

My friend Liz and I recently decided that knowing where you don't want to be in ten years is just as important if not more so than knowing where you want to be in that time. I don't want to be living alone. I don't want to not have another degree under my belt. I don't want to be wasting time. I don't want to feel like I have empty time waiting to be filled by something important. I don't want my family to wonder if I will ever amount to something more than what I am. I don't want to have compromised on what really matters. I don't want to have not made an impact on people.

There are moments in life where your path is so clear. And then that moment fades and the life you have created is all around you. And you can easily forget that path that was so clear to you in that moment. I remember in college when I was voted as one of a few people most likely to publish something. I remember every time someone makes a comment like "maybe after you publish your first book." I remember every time someone looks me in the face with eyes that say "you could be more." And I don't want to let those people down, mostly because I know they are fucking right. They are so right.

You know those moments in a movie when the perfect happy song comes on, and someone is driving down a road with the wind in their hair, and nothing but the open road of possibilities in front of them? I wake up every day feeling like that person and ending the day feeling like I haven't gone anywhere. I am so sick of it. I have a sense of purpose. I just wish I could find the road to take me there.

Katy Perrty sings "maybe a reason why all the doors are closed, so you could open one that leads you to the perfect road."

I hear that song and know she's right. I am just trying to find my right door that will lead me down my perfect road.

The cage

Each of us were born with a cage around our heart. It's there to protect us and hold it all together. We never think about the cage and how strong someone should have to be to break through it let alone how strong they'll need to be once they do.

I think most people think about their hearts as something that is just hanging out there, like a branch that birds can land on from time to time. Like a pendant on a necklace. Or perhaps, that's how I have always treated mine. I never thought till recently (and am still trying to teach myself to think) that my heart was something that someone should fight to get to, should fight to have. And not only fight to attain, fight to keep.

Your heart isn't free. We all come with a cage.

There are all sorts of reasons I love my cage. It's been around me a long time. It knows how to defend itself well enough. My cage knows the landscape and how to avoid pot-holes of heartbreak. Having a cage means you have something strong protecting you, that you have something worth breaking through to get to the good stuff.

But I hate my cage too. It hasn't garnered the protection I hoped it would. My heart is apparently stronger than what surrounds it. It goes where it wants when it wants, often times with little regard if it SHOULD be going there. It never adapts to my sneaky tricks of escape. My heart won't let that cage hold me back. Also, I have to walk blindly past the cage of crap that has formed some pretty dense walls around my heart. These issues would be hard to miss for someone trying to break through as well.

That cage, that baggage, those walls, that's some tough stuff. Ex-fiance issues, daddy issues, trust issues, body issues, faith issues. It's no joke. If someone wants to get to the pot of gold, they invariably have to go through some trash to get it.

So as I side-stepped or flat out ignored my cage, I think my heart is very familiar with the low-hanging fruit philosophy; if it is in the right position, it is an optimal target for ownership by someone else. This was not a good philosophy, one I changed over the past few years.

Your heart isn't free and it certainly costs a lot, especially if you try to give it to the wrong person.

But on those rare occasions when you do love the right person and they do break through the cage and earn the right to have a place in your heart, then you know they earned it.

Then comes the hard part for both of you......learning how to let someone else make your heart their home.

What is your view?

Perspective. It all depends on where you are. I used to be very preoccupied with the present but lately, questions about the future seem to be more prevalent. I was in a hotel recently where my mom and I stayed on the 18th floor. And in Orlando, you can count the number of buildings that tall on two hands. I could see for miles and miles. And it made me think: up here, my problems down there don't seem so big. Or maybe that they don't seem so dire.

As I search for a sense of purpose in life, I can't find the right perspective. I feel like I don't even have any. I had a plan (Go to grad school) now that that isn't happening I don't know where to go from here. I had applied to two schools and felt optimistic about either. When it did not happen, I am left with a void where my passion and perseverance once stood. The fighter in me knows I will never stop writing, but is it what I am meant to do? I don't know any more.

All I ever wanted for the last 5 years of my life was to write books and get them published and teach. And it was a dormant goal, one that was hibernating in me for a long time. I never knew I wanted to be a writer. I just loved to write. I never thought about making a profession out of it until about two years ago. I was having a heart to heart chat with some girlfriends over 5 (yes 5 don't judge) bottles of wine shared between all of us. After dispensing some romantic advice to her, my friend Katie looked at me and said "I cant wait for you to write books that I can buy someday." This was not the first time nor the last time I heard a friend make a comment like that to me. And it took many times over for me to believe that I might have something worth while to contribute to the world in print.

That night, the seed of hibernating passion came out from a restful winter. It is a passion I hold so strongly now. I know I must do it. Now, I just don't know how. I thought grad school was the path. Now, there is no clearly defined path. I don't feel compelled to keep trying to apply at lots of places. I did feel that way after the first time. Now, I feel as though perspective is my present goal. What does this mean for my path and my passion?

It's all a matter of perspective. I guess it feels like the end of the world to me but hey, I am still breathing, writing, and trying to make a meaningful life outta my one shot. It took my 18 stories up to see there are many roads to get to your destination. So I hit a dead end. Now I just have to turn around, take a look around, and see where the next road leads.

From this day forward

So much of life is about two things: thinking about how far you've come and how far you would still like to go.

I can't think of a day that I don't think about the miraculous things I was able to survive thus far in my life. A corrosive ex-fiance, a car crash in the ice that could have been fatal, a cross-country relocation (twice so far), dark days of depression, a ruptured appendix on Christmas day just to name a few. But in ten years from now, what will I say I overcame?

Or maybe I'll ask - how did I get the joy back?

I used to have these moments, moments where I was so happy to be alive, so happy to have survived, so happy to have gotten so far by my own measure. I would be in that moment so completely. I would close my eyes and smile at the landscape of my life and thirst for more, for the joy that future would bring. Slowly in the past couple of years, those days seem to have dried up like a piece a fruit cut open, left susceptible to the elements, decaying slowly. The life of those moments dried up when I was cut open by something along the way.

Ever since getting turned down from grad school again, god took away the dried fruit all together. There is nothing left to wither away now. There is nothingness left. It feels so heavy on my soul. It's ironic how heavy something that is absent can feel.

Maybe it was because I used to travel more. Maybe it was because I never felt a lack of purpose in my life till recently. It's like I was reading the most amazing book and suddenly turned a page to find the next one empty. The text stopped, right in the middle of all the action. I want to keep reading but there is nothing I can see. The pages are blank. I can't see what is supposed to be there.

I feel like lately, god has given me a mission to stop planning, to stop trying so hard to be something and focus on just being. And that doesn't sit well with the restless Aries that I am. Give me a mission, I will tackle it. Unless the mission is to do nothing. I just keep staring at those blank pages in frustrated rage, thinking that if I can just will it to, the story will continue. But it doesn't. I've been doing that for the past week, trying to will the future to come to fruition to me.

The quote "we must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us" keeps playing over and over in my head, like a song on repeat. It's like god is bashing that suddenly blank book on my head saying "do you think getting all huffy will help reveal your path any sooner?"

I have been known to take the long route when trying to get somewhere. I like to bang my head against the door for a while before making a decision. My uncle once said "Well you'll keep banging your head against the door long enough that when it hurts enough, you'll stop." It's maddening I tell you! How can I keep wanting and searching for a plan so badly when it seems to be the one that keeps eluding me lately? How can a smart girl like me do something that crazy when it is so frustrating? Wait....don't answer that. If I knew the answer to that question, I could have saved a lot of doors and not just my own.

Call this my quarter life crisis. It feels like it is. It is as though that book I was reading wasn't just any ole book, it was a map. And there are no directions now. Just whiteness. And I don't expect it to be something someone else could tell me. I know it's something I need to discover. I look back at the cover and remember something important: the road doesn't stop just because you can't see it in front of you. "Margo's survival map of success" is a guide but with no guaranteed routes. It only tells me that first and foremost, I will survive. It can't promise me where I will go, only that I can succeed where ever I choose.

So maybe the blank pages are really just a choice, a success, a joy that has yet to be. The blank pages aren't as antagonistic as I think they are. They are not saying (as I fear they were) "there is nothing from here on out." What I think they are really saying is "----------------->here is your future joy and success, whatever the future brings."

And maybe I have to think that to keep hope. But I'm really ok trying to keep hope alive when there is nothing but blank pages right now. I think the best of success in life is first grounded in a strong cement slab of hope. So I'll keep holding on my suddenly blank book in hopes that the future pages will be filled up soon!

Waves......

Waves. There are so many different kinds. There are the small waves that tickle your toes, wash away the sand, and leave you feeling renewed. There are the messy waves that knock you off your feet, that splash salt water in your eyes. There are waves that are like paintings; sandy blue with messy edges that are best left to roll forward while we watch. Then there are the big ones. The waves that you don't see coming, hidden behind the peaceful waves. They sneak up on you, blindsiding you. You loose your balance instantly, forgetting which way is up or down. Everything becomes blurry, disorienting, scary. Those waves suck you under, causing you to gasp at breath. You are merely just a puppet dancing in waves of strings. And swimming through it, you are, tangled, lost, drowning.

I've had that experience once surfing. I thought looking "up" that this was it. I might not make it to the surface. Then, by some twist of the waves, I bobbed up like a life vest jumping to the surface. I screamed to a friend nearby. He swam over and gave me short hand paddles and I plowed back to shore as if my life depended on it as it very much did at that moment. I loved to surf. I haven't surfed since that day.

Waves are stronger than they look. They don't just knock us off our feet. They can carry us away. That day at the beach, it felt like strong hands reached out and pulled me down. But waves don't just take you, they absorb into you.

I never quiet understood fully, until recently, why people talk about waves washing through you. Waves of sadness have no other route but to pass through.

You could be talking to someone about weddings, thinking about your favorite movie, writing an email, and BAM. The wave washes through you, seconds that linger like years passing by. You forget where you are. For a time, however long or short, you forget that you exist outside of that wave of sadness. It encompasses you. It swallows you.

Then, how ever many moments later, you remember that it was just a wave. It has an ebb and flow. So as it flows, it will also always recede. But those kinds of waves, they don't leave us completely right away. They leave a residue. It leaves us tarnished. It is as though while the wave washed through us, it stole something from us when it retreated.

As waves have washed over me in my life, both literally and emotionally, they have always taken their toll. Those waves while surfing took away my confidence to keep surfing. Present waves of sadness rob me of my endurance, perseverance, my sense of purpose. Even if it's only momentary, it still absorbs the possibilities around me, eliminating them from my view. And all I am left with is the feeling that I am permeable, susceptible to damage by even the smallest wave.

Maybe I will have the opportunity, and faith, to surf again. And maybe, I will be better able to avoid those waves that have blindsiding me. Till then, I will let the waves wash through in hopes that they will carry me through the dark waters to the light.

Rejection

Rejection. It’s personal. It’s painful. It’s agonizing how deep it strikes the core of who we are. Like someone reached in and took out your most intimate scary bits and shook them around in your face saying “how does it feel to fail?”

I never thought of myself as the type of person who would have to try so hard to be accepted. But there are many kinds of acceptance. In my case, it is regards to graduate school.

As I sit at my desk, my cheeks are painfully red, hot tears pouring over my eyelids. I have tears that are falling from my face to my leg and sliding down to my ankle. The sadness and pain roll over me, just like the tears over my cheeks. I can’t remember the last time I cried from such a vulnerable place.

Grad school application #2 – rejected.

I would love to say that I cried a few tears and then wiped my face and made my next plan of attack. But I haven’t. I did that last time when I was rejected from another school. Now, fate seems to be throwing me a curve ball I don’t know how to interpret. Keep going or change course? Buck up and keep fighting? Find the will to prove them wrong and apply again?

There is no will to try again.

I have no energy in me to hope. Not yet anyways.

Pain like this feels like there a viewing gallery in the heavens, where there must be more people watching me fall apart than I can see. I feel that exposed the emotion so near to the surface that it is literally on my surface in the form of tears. God must have invented tears as a way to let the pain to get out. There is no biological way pain of such depth could remain inside the body.

Maybe you have to feel like shit before you can feel better about something so painful. And it’s only painful because I wanted it so badly. I found the perfect program. I would be able to do my degree without moving, I could study and travel, I could get the education I so desperately desired.

But that’s the thing about desire. It’s a drug that takes ownership of our confidence, of our hope. And when the possibility of it is eliminated, all you are left thinking is “Where the fuck do I go from here?”

I just so desperately want to prove to the world that I am good at writing. It seems like the universe has been pulling me towards trying. As if I have found my mission in life and no one I try to convince believes in me enough to help me make it happen. And feeling like I am all out of "try" (at least for today) is more crushing than the disappointment.

Rejection makes you question everything. “Why am I not good enough? Why didn’t they want me? What could I have done differently? Is it worth getting this upset about if I could pick myself up and make a new plan tomorrow? Should I even try again?”

There is light for me, even if I can't see it today. But damn this shit sucks. And I have never been ok with things being shitty. But acceptance, the final stage of grief, is looming around the corner, a very BIG corner. So I am going to continue not being ok till I have no other choice but to be ok.

I have never been fond of “no” and it has now been cemented as my least favorite word. Nor fond of possibilities eliminated.

I am in the emotional place equivalent to laying on the cold concrete floor in a parking garage ten levels underground down where you can go down no more.

I guess I should see that as positive right? If you can’t get worse, you can only get better from here.

And old hair stylist and I once decided that all great stories start with someone on the floor. Here’s to my great story to come.

So steady as you go....

I found this article that I wrote in college for my dating column in the school newspaper. It's ironic that the things I thought then are the exact same now. I haven't edited but I'd like to think my writing has improved in 5 years. But I wanted to post something because I haven't in a while....so here we go....

So Steady As You Go

In this day and age of love and relationships, it is a game and the best players seem to end up the winners. When did it become so hard for us to be honest with one another? Why is it that we crave the game and not the participants?

Perhaps it comes from our desire to always win. As corny as it sounds, we like to think that if we work hard enough and try long enough that we will succeed in any task we tackle. But then it seems to become apparent that love is not a game at all but indeed something much greater than a game.

Love is many things, many of which go beyond any justice words could give. But for arguments sake in this article, love is about choice and weather or not you are in it for the player or for the win. Do you pursue someone because you like them or because you just don’t want to be alone? Do you pursuer them because they are enticing or because there is a lack of better options?

Perhaps the initial reasons for chasing after someone is irrelevant but as time progresses, they are either worth it because you care or because you won’t give up on another conquest. To those seekers of winning and not the heart, find another game and stick with it. The heart is tender yet strong all in one but never deserving of being played. You cannot pass go. You cannot collect $100. In matters of the heart, it is a winner takes all or game over. There is not much room for anything in-between yet there often is. We either hope to win or hope to find someone who is in it for the right reasons.

People often jokingly say “Don’t hate the playa, Hate the Game?” Why not both? Why would anyone care about someone or a game that is short lived and normally leaves one person, sometimes both, hurt?

There are just some things that shouldn’t be toyed with and the heart is one of them. Continuous damage to the heart leads to pessimists and more players, something the world NEVER needs more of. The players are no more than lovers screwed over one too many times so they give up on hoping that something real will actually materialize in their life.

Never give up on the power that genuine care and love can have in your life. It has changed me many times over when I wanted to give up.

Love also means being afraid because only when love is involved do you have something to lose that really matters: you heart. We love whether or not we are ready or prepared. There is no planning involved (goodness knows I’ve tried) and it is almost always with someone who is some way a surprise in your life. When you love someone, you miss them even when you wish you didn’t. You want to be with them even when you know it’s the right thing to be away. You want them to be happy, either with you or someone else (even though we always think we are the best for them regardless). So go on, Be afraid. If your not, how much do they really matter to you?

Life is about follow-through

Life is a verb. It's about what we do. It is an action, forward motion, forward progression toward a desired destination. At any given moment, you could be living for a better job, living for a better relationship with lost friends, living for a lost opportunity to have kids with the man you love, living for the moment when you might hear your boyfriend say "I love you" for the first time.

I once read that you had to identify what you want, plan out how to get, then the hardest part--do it! Life is identifying your wants, figuring out how to get them, and then doing something about it.

And the thing that just is befuddles me is our expectations. It should be easier to DO IT, whatever we decide IT to be as we get older. My mom said it best. "I think it's harder. The stakes are higher. You have more to loose."

Life is both your choice and how you decide to live it. And it's not like a train that makes stops. I heard this great quote in a movie once that sums up my point. "This is your life- it doesn't wait for you to get back on your feet." We sometimes get derailed, stalled, and have to slam on the breaks when something unexpected is in our way, preventing us from moving forward.

It makes that choice to live and progress a longer thought process, at least it is for me. You think about it longer. You wait. You waste precious time. You try to convince yourself that it will be ok if it does not go according to your hopes or plans. But really, rarely does live ever go as planned. You can hope. But at some point you will have to close your eyes and act. Take a leap and put yourself out there, working toward your goal.

Then comes gravity and all it's infinite weight and density. The gravity of action. The gravity of a feared result. Gravity of the real possibility that the happy ending really won't be happy or the end at all. Sometimes the choices we make, the actions we take, lead to the dead end of the train tracks. There is no where to go in sight. You have to make a path. And you have no idea where to begin.

It's about follow-through. This is your life. And no one is going to fight for it except for you.

What I know about Grace and Growing up

I don't care how old I am today, at any given time I can go back to being 5 years old again. Mentally that is.

When I think about being an adult, one word rings through my head: responsibility. No wonder that's all our parents and elders talk about. The concept has had time to sink into them while it seems foreign when I was younger. As I have grown, the people around me have taught me how to behave with grace and elegance. I am not sure how much of that actually pans out in my actions but I try to think about it every time I want to act badly.

And when I want to act badly, I feel 5 years old again. I want to get all huffy, stomp my feet, yell, throw my arms around, and go sit in a corner with my arms crossed. I am not sure if I ever did that when I was 5 but I've seen enough other children do it at that age to feel fairly confident I had a moment or two that looked like that.

Well I think those moments where you mentally go back to being 5 years old never go away. No matter how old I am, the feeling of wanting to act like that angry 5 year old when I am frustrated doesn't disappear with time.

I am not sure why we act like that when we are actually 5 but I know that I want to act like that at 27 because I feel powerless at times. Powerless to change certain obstacles or frustrations. Powerless to make people behave or feel a certain way. Powerless to overcome that which stands in my way between a happy good day and a powerless "I really want to act like a pissed off 5 year old" day. And I recognize how immature it sounds to want to act like that. I don't think it's a conscious want to be that way but more the fact that at one time, it was tolerable to behave that way without too many hellish consequences. At 5 years old, you go to bed without being able to finish your dinner and you don't get to watch tv. At 27, you could get fired, lose your apartment, lose your car, lose your friends, lose your dignity, lose your credibility.

I asked someone at work today "How do responsible adults develop healthy coping mechanisms for stress? Are they just better at it than me or are they just better at dealing with things because they have been working at it longer than me?." To which my co-worker said "Yeah, it must be that they've been doing it longer because I've been dealing with shit for 15 years and I'm still learning how to handle that better."

When I think about who handles stress the best, I think about my mom and how I learned to try and embody that from her.

My mom has always been in a high position of power at academic institutions. She has always worked very hard, become the best at what she does, and gained the respect of her fellow peers every step of the way. But when there are challenges, the severity of them is always on a very large, significant scale. I guess that's what you agree to take on when you are in a position of power; you agree to take the credit when it's good and the responsibility if it's bad.

But whenever I saw an issue that my mom tackled, she did it with Grace. I never once got the sense that she wanted to refer back to her 5 year old self. She was the person who handled that situation as it came, in the moment. I saw strength, perseverance, and poise in her determination. I still do to this day.

So when I mentally jump to the 5 year old having a "spazz out- party of 1" session, I think about my mom. I think about the face she would give me if she knew what I was thinking. I can see her face so stern and almost sad with her arms crossed. I can hear her gentle voice saying "you don't really think that's going to help you accomplish anything do you?" I can see her face relax as I mentally go back somewhere more healthy and less well, immature. I can see her face then smiling as I give up the 5 year old self and start becoming my 27 year old self again. The thoughts of rage and anxiety are replaced with perspective and determination.

On any given day, I can so clearly envision my mother smiling at me with pride. I want her to be proud of me. I want me to be proud of me. And 5 year old me doesn't make anybody proud. But 27 year old me has and that is who I have to remember to be when things go south. I got this far, I survived worse along the way, and bad is relative. When I think about all the reasons my mom would smile at me with pride, none of them are about me wanting to go back to being 5 years old.

So maybe coping is not just about acting appropriately. Perhaps it's just about letting yourself mentally go backwards before moving forward with grace in reality.

Life on Friday

People have been telling me all my life to write. Someone told me today I should have a blog. So didn't want to be rude by letting people think I can't rise to the occasion. So here is my attempt at documenting life as I see it and feel it, day by day. I hope it touches whoever reads this in some way.

Today I am one day closer to dying. One day further away from living. Yet I am alive. But the reality of life and death paid me a visit today.

I found out a girl from my college graduating class passed away last year. Considering our 5 year anniversary is this year and I am 27, this is a shock. Even more shocking was that she was in medical school and died of brain cancer. Can you imagine, being in school and learning about everything that can destroy the body and how to fix it, and then hear that you are diagnosed with one of the very things you are learning about how to eradicate? She was 26 I think. I did not know her well. But looking at her pictures made me think of her smile when ever I saw her. She had kind eyes and a bright white teeth and perfectly blond hair.

The scary thing was, I had no idea until I got an email from the people organizing our 5 year reunion saying they would hold a memorial service for her at our reunion. Everyone in our graduating class got that email. How freaking sad? People you know, dying, gone and you don't even know. I wish I could know inherently, like in a psychic way, so I could do something to show that person I cared, if even in a small way. I instantly sent a message to a friend I know knew her in college. She said "I had a feeling you were gonna ask about her." I wanted to find out how she died because the memorial email did not say. It is a strange feeling to know that someone you once saw, every day, is gone. Knowing that you will never see them that way again.

The reality of mortality is ever more present the longer you live. And hearing about death to me only makes it harder to swallow, never easier. I was not friends with this girl. But hearing of her passing makes my heart sad in a very real way. To think, why her and not someone else? The scarier thought is: this will only continue to happen as I get older. And that thought is the scariest. I hate the reality of loss. How tangible it is, how unfair to seems, how unrealistic it feels to be given the gift of life only to know it will one day be taken away again. How does one come to grips with that reality? I wish I knew the answer. Because the fear of death, something that should not plague a 27 year old woman, scares the shit out of me. And however I ponder it, it never scares me less, only more.

I went to this deceased girl's facebook page. It was comment after comment about how her friends were thinking about her every day and missing her. I didn't feel right commenting on it but in a way, I want to. I hope in some alternate universe she knows that I thought about her today. I really hope so.