thought at work

i feel as though i am surrounded by transition at this point in my life. perhaps its because i am 22, perhaps it is because i am a social worker in a transitional living setting, perhaps it is because everything in the world is changing and i can do little about it. some of the largest transitions of my life have happened in the past year. i graduated college. i moved across the country. i started grad school. i began to think about my life and what it would hold. 

and thus i have realized something. one of the things i am most thankful for in my life is transition. god bless transition. i hate it most of the time—with every fiber of my being i resist change—but damn if it isn’t great. 

giving up the only life (and the only state) i had ever known and moving to colorado was the biggest transition of my life. at the time, i was only vaguely aware of it, i think. i was far too caught up in the whirlwind of life that occurs the summer after graduation, and i was making impulsive decisions, freaking out briefly, and then forgetting about them after i shoved them under the great shroud of denial. thus it was with colorado. i knew i was going, obviously, but i wasn’t thinking about it. i wasn’t thinking about the realities of leaving or of coming back. i wasn’t thinking about how completely and totally i would be transformed. i just DID. just doing is a strange notion for someone as irritatingly rational as I am, and i don’t think that i realized that it was happening until it did. and then i realized a great and beautiful lesson: you can just move somewhere. you can embark on an adventure, a great unknown, and succeed. 

it all hit me as i was driving to work today, grinning from ear to ear for no good reason and belting some song on the radio: leaving was the best thing i ever did for myself. never have i felt more free, more independent, more ALIVE. never have i felt so brave and wonderful and true to who i am. about once a week, even in the midst of crappy days or a nasty cold that won’t quit, i catch myself smiling, or singing, or simply existing in the middle of some inexplicable fit of elation. 

when i finally felt at home in nashville after living there for a year, the reason i loved the city was as a result of the people, the school, the community. the people i met there changed me, transformed the way i thought, and became my closest friends. finding a home here has been different. obviously, i have school as a crutch, socially and intellectually, and there have been phenomenal friends who have made me feel loved and well cared for too, but i think the wonderful thing has been learning to build a home alone. to be the purest, bravest, most honest form of myself, and then to just sit in that and have it be enough. i’ve learned to spend time alone, to take myself on mini dates, to strike up conversations with strangers and take risks. i dance around my apartment by myself at midnight at the end of a long day and i feel alive in the most basic human way. 

i will certainly freak out about whatever transition comes next, where graduation will lead me and where i might be living in six months, but i am confident that i will always remember that this—this beautiful year of discovering, knowing and loving myself—will always always be enough.