“I’M NOT CRAZY, I’M JUST A LITTLE UNWELL..” -MATCHBOX TWENTY

I used to define my life by numbers. Numbers on clothing tags, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16. Or by numbers on a scale, 150, 170, 190, 210. I am not denying the fact that I am overweight or that I could be healthier. But rather, I’m trying out this experiment. That maybe, just maybe, my self-worth is not in a number on my tag or on the scale. Maybe it’s not in the number of followers I have or friends on Facebook or likes on my picture. Maybe it’s not the number of texts I get in a day or how many close friends I have. Maybe the key to happiness is not having everything or anyone. Maybe it is solely and completely in me. Inside what makes me, me. And I find it hard to understand why I shouldn’t love this phase of my life. This uncertainty. When everyone is striving to be something or someone or something to someone. Right now, I just want to be here. I have literally never been more uncomfortable in my life. This phase of being completely detached and yet so open and vulnerable. This phase where my life is more uncertain and unclear than it’s ever been. But maybe there’s magic in that. They say that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. So maybe this is the start of something. And not the end.

The happy medium. As someone who tends to live life in the extreme, the happy medium is something I long for. Going from controlling husband to passive husband, one extreme to the other, is just one example where I failed at finding the happy medium. I believe that peace lies in the happy medium and I also believe that it is one of the hardest things in life to achieve. We are creatures of passion. But we are also taught at a young age that passion fades. But I don’t think it does. I think we just stop trying. We have been raised in a society where loyalty and dedication are not expected. We can leave a job if we hate it, leave a spouse if we are unhappy. But what if it’s not because we hate our job or that we are unhappy, but because we have stopped caring? Stop trying? Once the honeymoon phase wears off of anything, we get tired and move on. What if we found the center between love and hate. Happy and unhappy. What if we didn’t expect happiness all the time, like it’s a destination. Like happiness owes us something. Life is what we make of it. Love is how much effort we are willing to put into it. Happiness is finding peace in the unhappy moments and knowing it won’t last forever. That each phase of life is just that. A phase. And if there was a way in, there is a way out.

When I decided, almost a month ago now, that I wasn’t going to go to Spain, my heart quite literally broke. Because everything I thought I knew, disappeared. And because everything I was hiding from, surfaced. All the things that Spain distracted me from, became something I could no longer ignore. The decision to not go lay solely in knowing that these problems and issues and feelings were never going anywhere. No matter how many cities I went to or places I visited. No matter how many pictures I posted and planes I flew on. No matter how far away I took my heart, everything that breaks it was going to come with me. And maybe I would be distracted for a month or two or six. But what I was hiding from would most definitely surface at some point. And the hardest decision I’ve ever made was to do something I knew I needed to do over doing something I wanted, more than anything. Removing myself from the only support, the very small support, that I have was going to be a mistake. I knew that if I wasn’t sleeping in America, I wasn’t going to sleep in Spain. If I was crying everyday in America, I was going to cry in Spain. Nothing was going to change just because I was across the world. Change lies in me. In the effort I put into myself and the love I feel for me. And I loved myself this month, more than I ever have, by making the incredibly hard decision to stay. Stay and face it all. Stay and fight.

So what am I going to do now? I’m gonna work. Hard. I’m going to work on the most important mission in my entire life. Me. I haven’t been single since age 15. My entire life I have been living for other people. Putting myself on the back burner of life and never doing what I think is best for myself. Falling into these relationships and giving so much of myself that I forget everything I am and what I’m capable of. I have dumbed myself down and stayed small in order to fit into a world that I definitely don’t belong in. I am not apart of this world, this society. I am larger than that. So much bigger than I ever knew. Maybe if we stopped trying to fit into this mold that we believe had been shaped for us, making ourselves smaller, quieter, hidden, unseen, we would be able to see ourselves the way others see us. People tell me all the time that I have a big personality. But I’ve been making myself small for as long as I can remember. Forgetting exactly who I am and what I know I can do. I am not apart of this world. I do not fit into some mold. And thank god for that.

What’s next? I have no idea. For the first time in my life I have no plan. I see no big future. I have no big dreams. But I feel like I have the most solid and steady foundation I’ve ever had. Any maybe, for now, that’s enough. Maybe this is the happy medium. And when my heart cries out for something more extreme and impulsive, when it feels like it can’t be alone or needs something spectacular to happen, it is only because it is feeling highly uncomfortable with the change that is happening in this moment. As humans we love to fight off feelings. Fight off the urge to just sit still. Fight the urge to be alone and find happiness and peace in that. But I believe all my answers lie in this extremely uncomfortable time of my life. I believe they lie in me. And the only way I’m going to find them is to just let it be.