The Life of M

One of the most embarrassing things about me is my allergies. By no means am I saying it’s the only thing, but it definitely tops the list. See, when I sneeze, I don’t just sneeze once. I don’t just sneeze twice. On a good day, I sneeze five or six times and get it over with. Sometimes, I sneeze twice, then wait an acceptable amount of time, then sneeze again and every thirty seconds after that.

Sometimes, I give honkin’ big sneeze. I mean, this is a serious business sneeze. I start hyperventilating, and my face scrunches together like the pleats of an accordion, and I bare my teeth like a rabid animal and I have to scramble to hold myself together so I don’t go spraying snot everywhere and then I sneeze so loudly I literally shout, “AHH-HWOO” and my throat burns. If I’m in a small space, it’s merely just loud. If I’m in a large place, it echos.

Sometimes my sneezes are tiny. A tiny little cough or a snort that people give me funny looks for. The worst are during classes when people notice that I’ve sneezed and say ‘Bless you.’ They then feel compelled to say ‘Bless you’ every time after that. However, by the thirteenth time I’ve sneezed, they give me a look with raised eyebrows that says, ‘seriously? Do I need to call an ambulance?’

So, a lesson in proper sneezing etiquette from the Queen of Allergies: if the person sneezes once, and it’s a good solid sneeze, you may offer the proper sentiments. If the person sneezes and a second and a third time, with proper space in between, likewise. If the person sneezes five times in a row and is turning red, let them do their thing, catch their breathe, and please do not draw unwanted attention upon them.

Thanks so much!

So I’m not a real emotional person. This whole evangelical business really rubs me the wrong way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for showing enthusiasm and affection and that you’re passionate about something, but for me, when it comes to religion it has always been a personal thing. Even just thinking about making a big deal out of my spiritual life makes me shudder and cringe.

Which is odd because I’m open about everything else in my life. Maybe it’s because it’s something that’s so deeply personal to me I don’t want to spoil it by blathering on and on about it the way some people do when they have a new purse or a new boyfriend. This is something intimate and deep and long-lasting and it’s not that I don’t want to share it, I just want to keep it sacred.

That’s why KTB and St. Mary’s has been such a life-changing experience for me. I spend time with girls and in a community who have the same sort of burning love for being Catholic and following God, sometimes erroneously sometimes not, that I do. It’s absolutely ridiculous and I’ve never given in, but sitting in those pews just makes me so blindingly happy that I want to cry. I’m not a ninny so I don’t, but then, the fact that I even feel so moved that I want to cry  makes me have to struggle with the urge to bawl.

I did retreats and youth group and Church-affiliated things in high school and junior high. I met some great adults who really inspired me and who I still look up to, but one of my biggest issues was that I was afraid I would never feel as passionate or as comfortable in my relationship with Christ as they seemed to. And now, I have that feeling.

Before, in high school, I felt awkward for being more reserved and respectful but, ironically, now when I’m in college and everyone around me is going crazy, I get to go out with friends who understand that I don’t drink (purely a personal preference), I’m not trashy or slutty or guy-obsessed, and I’m considerate to others. I don’t have to temper my personality to make other feel more comfortable.

And it’s still kind of awkward for me to be saying this much about my spiritual life but at the same time, I’ve grown so much and I’m so happy and in love with God that it’s just like any other time I’ve overwhelmed with emotion: I have to write.

In closing, I’ve been looking for this quote that’s only half-stuck in my brain. By half-stuck, I mean I can only remember half of it. So I googled “To write is to…” and found, “To write is to live forever,” which I think would make a cool tattoo one day. I also found this quote which I find relevant:

“”To read is to empower,
To empower is to write,
To write is to influence,
To influence is to change,
To change is to live”.”
— Jane Evershed

Writing changes my life everyday, in every way and I refuse to cease doing it until the day I die.

I’m packing to go back to school and I’m ready to tear my hair out so I figured I’d try and pull all of my thoughts out of my head, stick them to this post, then leave them here so I can make it through packing, the next twelve hours, the drive back, and unpacking without one single breakdown.

How is that everyone else seems to have made the transition from home to college so seamlessly? I thought I was ready to go back but pulling all of my things together, trying to decide what stays and what goes, is making me want to curl up in my closet and hide. It could be that I’m not ready to go yet but I’m just going to blame it on the stress of moving (I swear I’m breaking out in hives thinking about move-out day in May).

Everyone’s college experience seems to be vastly different from mine. Maybe it’s because I can’t slow down and focus on the now since I’m too busy looking ahead to what my next step to achieving my future will be. I read somewhere that as young adults we cling to the things in our life so hard because our future is so vast ahead of us and our reluctance to let go is really what makes this part of our lives so turbulent.

Don’t tell my mother but I’m having a hard time of letting go of home. I’m fully aware that I can come back, but it definitely won’t be the same. My younger sister, my best friend, will find other best friends and will find my teasing not a sign of endearment but something to be tolerated whenever I’m home for the weekend. My old room is missing all of the things that made it mine and soon won’t even be mine anymore. Coming home for the three days and two nights that is a usual college student’s visit makes me bitter because I know in less than 72 hours I’ll have to leave again and so I try to avoid visits as often as I can unless I know they’re going to be for a long amount of time.

It’s times like these that I look to my older sister and marvel how she did it. What was it that pulled her so strongly that she cut the apron strings and moved on with her life separate from her childhood. I enjoyed my childhood, I appreciated it. Maybe I’m cocky to assume that I already know everything that there is to know about life, but if I wasn’t overconfident then I would show how truly terrified and vulnerable I am (vulnerability is a big no-no with me).

I got through last semester through sheer will power alone; at first the semester was horrible, but then it became bearable and by that point Christmas break was within sight (four months away) and I knew if I put my head down and just worked through it, I would be home in no time. The only answer for the spring is to do the same but, since it looks like I might be spending my summer in good ole CStat and I don’t have anything to look forward to but a long weekend here or there, I’m immobile at the thought of taking that first step and getting back there.

Of course, once I’m there, these insecurities will all melt away into the back of my mind until I’m having a really rough day, but right now the fears are larger than life and I’m five years old again scared of the dark. My biggest fear: that I won’t ever be able to find my place away from here. That I won’t find something to uproot me from Victoria, Texas and take me to the place where my future is waiting for me. And if that uprooting doesn’t come, if I can’t cut the apron strings, then I will be unsatisfied wherever I go and always come straying back to Victoria and narrowing my ambitions to fit a dream that I can easily achieve back at home.

Of all of my siblings, I always felt like I was the one who wanted to get the furthest away and now that it comes down to it, I’m choking. Maybe the reason I envy the people who get to go where I want to be is not because they are in the place that I one day aspire to be, but because they have the bravery to charge out into the world and go after their dreams.

There’s nothing to be done about it though. I might be scared of my future but it’s something I have to face and I have to put my head down and push through, then that’s what I’ll do. Even if I feel like crying like a baby.

Let’s get one thing clear: the fastest way to piss me off is to tell me how to fix my hair. That sounds silly but if I have one vain bone in my body, it’s not a bone and it sits at the top of my head. So let’s not dance around the subject and just get straight down to it: I have great hair. Of course, you might not agree but I really don’t care; I think it’s fantastic and mine is the only opinion that matters (healthy self-image and all that).

There are several parts of my body that I should feel self-conscious about and, admittedly, do. But I’m definitely of an old-school turn of mind and my tastes, as well as my body, are quite in sync with the styles of generations past.

One thing that I absolutely refuse to ever feel self-conscious about is my full, thick head of hair. This is not to say that it looks good 100% of the time but when I fix it up to look good, it looks good.

And this is definitely not to say that I’ve always felt this way. Actually, managing and loving my hair has been a hard-won battle so that’s why I take great umbrage when you tell me that it looks just fine the way it is: untouched, frizzy, icky and sticking in every direction (Mom!).

My hair even has it’s own timeline. Once upon a time there were the Princess Years, when I was a child and had the long, blond beautiful hair (I’ve seen the pictures) of a storybook princess. It was barely blond for a time but leaned towards the golden color it would later become. It was long and fell loosely down my back, capped in little wild ringlets at the ends. A friend said the other night that we always seem to forget the painful parts of life and there was pain that came with having hair that long—mostly just brushing it—but in my mind it was perfect. It was every mother’s dream for their little girl.

And then came the Uglies. The time that now makes me shudder with horror and then made me want to cry and hide my head under a paper bag. It was this terrible yellowish-brown color taking the form of a frizzy misshapen mass on my head. For some reason my mother thought it was beautiful and since she insisted wearing it down for Sunday Mass, going to church was beyond painful and many of arguments ended with me in tears because I was so embarrassed.

This seems far too dramatic but before you judge, think of that one thing—a certain body part or habit or personality quirk—that debilitates with the mere thought of having to leave that part of yourself bare for the world to see and judge. Everyone has this weak spot and for me it was hair, untamed.

During the Uglies I wore my hair mostly in a ponytail. And then I cut it short because for someone insane reason the book I was reading at the time by my childhood favorite author, Tamora Pierce, featured a character with short hair. I’ve learned my lesson that storybook hair only lasts while you’re a child and you should never do something based on support from a fictional person who has perfect hair and doesn’t live in South Texas or anywhere else with humidity.

That was a rough time and after coming out of that, I never wanted to mess with my hair again so it became long. Somehow, I stumbled upon the realization that my long hair was quite pretty actually, especially if I tamed it just a little with some mousse. With that, my curly hair was reborn.

It took a while to get the technique of it just right. When I first started doing my hair with mousse, I would let it dry then slap it with mousse. This was both painful and messy; since I have such thick hair, I shed easily and it would come loose in clumps stuck to my sticky fingers. I remembered that when my older sister used to scrunch her hair way back in the day—she was blessed with the perfect shade of blond and perfectly straight and manageable—she would do it with her hair wet.

As my hair grew so did my love of it. It was quite pretty, really long and curly and when it dried just right it was this neato golden color. I like keeping people guessing so one day, without warning, I chopped it all off.

I kept cutting it shorter and shorter and last week I cut it too short so I’ve had to go through another adjustment period. I’ve learned how to cope so it wasn’t nearly as terrible a phase as the Uglies but it was rough. My new best friend is the curling iron which has helped me find my place among my big-haired Texan brethren.

It’s also helped me find myself. I never thought I would be one of those big-haired people but here I am, embracing my hair with gusto. Every time I feel it bounce I gush with pride. So I realize, I’ve always been a big-haired person. That might not be ideal in this society where everything has to be straight and skinny and flat and in line but I really don’t give a damn because I have great hair.

Skip the Dick. Catcher in the Rye was reeaallllly weird and I got nothing out of it. 1984 was AMAZING. Tess of the d’Ubervilles was beyond depressing. Dumas’ is one of my favorite writers. Gouge your eyes out when reading Ethan Frome and skip Madame Bovary in favor of The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I think it’s much better and when we read it in high school, we sort of lumped The Awakening, Anna Karenina, and A Doll’s House all together and had a much more enjoyable literary experience (except for the Anna Karenina part). Reading SparkNotes for Of Mice and Men would suffice just as well as actually reading the book. I would say substitute The Importance of Being Earnest for Picture of Dorian Gray if you want to read some entertaining Oscar Wilde. A Tale of Two Cities went on foreeeveerrrr and I don’t remember anything about it except it was long and depressing and the majority of my class failed the test that we had to take with it. I loathed Robinson Crusoe.

taytay2013:

I have been carrying this list around for easily 4 or 5 years. I don’t even recall where it came from, probably an english teacher along the way. I think I am going to try to read all of these before I turn 30. Ready, Set, Go!

Call of the Wild- Jack London

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- Mark Twain

The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Crucible- A. Miller

Red Badge of Courage- Crane

Moby Dick- Herman Melville

To Kill a Mockingbird-Harper Lee

Catcher in the Rye-Salinger

The Old Man and the Sea- Hemingway

My Antonia-Cather

Go Down, Moses- Faulkner

Death of  a Salesman- Miller

Portrait of a Lady- James

The Jungle-Upton Sinclair

The Great Gatsby- Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night-Fitzgerald

Sister Carrie-Dreiser

Herzog- Saul Bellow

Another Country- Baldwin

Go Tell it on the Mountain- Baldwin

A Separate Peace- Knowles

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter- McCullers

Grapes of Wrath- Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men- Steinbeck

Look Homeward, Angel- Wolfe

Brave New World- Huxley

1984- George Orwell

Animal Farm- George Orwell

Tale of Two Cities- Dickens

Lord of the Flies- Golding

Great Expectations- Dickens

Wuthering Heights- Bronte

Jane Eyre- Bronte

Heart of Darkness- Conrad

Lord Jim- Conrad

Pride and Prejudice- Austen

Return of the Native- Hardy

Tess of the D’Ubervilles- Hardy

Mrs. Dalloway- Woolfe

Sons and Lovers- Lawrence

Lady Chatterley’s Lover- Lawrence

Of Human Bondage- Maughm

A Death in the Family- Agee

Fahrenheit 451-Bradbury

The Illustrated Man- Bradbury

The Martian Chronicles-Bradbury

The Good Earth- Buck

The Stranger- Camus

Don Quixote- Cervantes

The Oxbow Incident- Clark

The Moonstone- Collins

The Pilot- Cooper

The Last of the Mohicans- Cooper

The Deerslayer- Cooper

Robinson Crusoe- Defore

Oliver Twist- Dickens

David Copperfield- Dickens

Crime and Punishment- Dostoyevsky

The Count of Monte Cristo- Dumas

The Three Musketeers- Dumas

Adam Bede- Eliot

The Mill on the Floss- Eliot

The Invisible Man- Ellison

Intruder in the Dust- Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury- Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom- Faulkner

Giant, Cimarron-Ferber

Tom Jones- Fielding

This Side of Paradise- Fitsgerald

Madame Bovery- Flaubert

A Passage to India- Forster

The Vicar to Wakefield-Goldsmith

The Power and the Glory-Greene

The Mayor of Casterbridge- Hardy

The House of Seven Gables- Hawthorne

Catch 22- Heller

For Whom the Bell Tolls- Hemingway

The Sun also Rises-Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms-Hemingway

Siddartha- Hisse

Kon-Tike- Heyerdahl

Green Mansions- Hudson

Les Miserables- Hugo

Brave New World Revisited-Huxley

The Portrait of a Lady- James

Daisy Miller- James

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man- Joyce

The Sea Wolf- London

Of Human Bondage- Maughm

The Moon and Sixpence- Maughm

The Razor’s Edge- Maughm

Billy Budd- Melville

All Quiet on the Western Front- Remarque

Giants in the Earth- Rolvaag

Ivanhoe-Scott

Frankenstein- Shelley

Tortilla Flat- Steinbeck

Cannery Row- Steinbeck

Treasure Island-Stevenson

Kidnapped-Stevenson

Vanity Fair- Thackeray

The Return of the King- Tolken

Tom Sawyer- Mark Twain

War and Peace- Tolstoy

Around the World in Eighty Days- Verne

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea- Verne

All the King’s Men- Warren

The Magic Time Machine- Wells

The War of the Worlds-Wells

Ethan Frome- Wharton

The Picture of Dorian Gray- Wilde

The Bridge of San Luis Rey- Wilder

Mrs. Dalloway- Woolf

So I had this crazy weird dream last night. It was too strange to pass up and tell everyone about. To begin with, I was back at school and walking around campus when I ran into a friend of mine. I don’t remember which friend she invited me to her house to eat lunch with her family. We got there and everyone was running around and I said, “What’s going on?” My friend replied that she had forgotten that today was a special day for their cult and they had a ritual to perform. Would I like to come along?

I said yes. Baaad mistake. It was really weird but it was cool because my friend seemed embarrassed and said she only went along with it because it was family tradition. Reassuring

THEN we were floating on the river, but really it was more of this shallow narrow stream that our butts kept dragging on the bottom. So we’re floating down this stream and getting increasingly frustrated but then we find some abandoned children—two, Andrew and his little brother, Javin—and walk back to the road and have to hitchhike back to our cars, which were at the end of the river.

We get picked up by these obese people in dune buggies which is only important because there was almost no room for us and we have to leave all of our tubes and one of our friends behind. The dune buggy people take us this really complicated way back to the house that I grew up as a child, going over hills and steep dropoffs. Once the dune buggy people drop us off at our house, we set out looking for Andrew and Javin’s parents the way you would look for a lost dog’s owners: with poster’s hung on telephone poles.

Their father finally comes to get them and I cry because it felt as if they were my babies and I write them long, heartfelt letters to read when their older to help them understand why I had to give them away. The dream ends like a movie, with this sequence of images, of Andrew and Javin and their younger brother (this is my favorite part) JACOB THE ADVENTURING BABY, doing all sorts of cool things to this really cool soundtrack, like hang-gliding, para-sailing, mountain climbing, and white water kayaking.

Did you get that? Jacob the Adventuring Baby hang-glides, para-sails, climbs mountains and white water kayaks!! As a baby! I want a baby like that.

Today, I am going to acknowledge the little successes. I phrase it this way so that it seems like a serious post, but really, I’ve got nothing in particular that I want to write about, only that I feel I’ve been neglecting doing this for some while. I feel that I am entitled to not having a planned topic that I’m itching to write about if only because it would require imagination, stimulus, and brain power I seem to be lacking today.

After I’ve had a particularly successful time of sitting down and just writing, I usually make a list of all of the things I need to do next, since it’s fresh on my mind. More often the not, the list is all over the place and includes random facts, asides, reminders, to do lists for the morning (I do a lot of my writing at night because I’m a procrastinator and put it off during the day, when I have time), jumps around from project to project (not limited to projects that I’m currently working on and often addressing projects that I finished a year ago but still obsessing over).

The list usually starts out in pen, but once I’ve got my brain going (I’m very good at lists, and adding onto them), I usually roll over five minutes later and grab some sort of coloring utensil (I have three jars on my desks of markers, colored pencils, and crayons; not one of them has pens. I do not know why it is this way.) and scribble, with the lights off, five more notes.

If I started a To Do list now for the writing that I should get done tomorrow, it would be another late night, and I’m actually quite tired. So instead, a list of little successes to keep me motivated.

Today I wrote:

**I finished the piece I had been working on, effectively ending this weird five and a half month no-writing (aka writer’s block, but I’m too cool to call it something so cliche) zone I’ve been in. It was difficult because it was a transitional piece, moving the story from what I had last been inspired to write (which was crap and took four revisions, so probably not that inspired) six months ago, and onto what I know is coming next. It’s not the best I’ve ever written but it’s forward motion.

**I finished all those damn revisions (though since I did that first, it should probably be at the top of the list)!! Four times! Four times it took to read over and over again, changing minute details but eventually feeling satisfied.

**Really looooong e-mails back and forth with a buddy of mine who is also doing some writing of his own. But I’ve enjoyed it because he gives me some valuable insight that I totally would’ve missed just because he has experience, and in return I get to flex my future editing skills.

**An e-mail with a certain literary agent in New York….

You thought this was going to be a boring list, didn’t you? Well, those with the patience will be rewarded. I would say cross your fingers but I’m keeping my own expectations low because, while the prospect is thrilling, it’s still a prospect. I  have the rest of my life to pursue publication and agents and whatnot. Right now, I just want to keep writing as I’ve always written: for my own ridiculously low expectations.

I’m out like trout, (Dan Bergstein)

MMMA

Every single part of the rest of my life is uncertain. I don’t know if I’ll get married in my twenties, my thirties, (God forbid) my forties, or even at all. I don’t know where I’m going or what I plan on doing whenever I get to that place that I’m going. How will I even know when I’m there? The plans for the rest of my life depend on my future.

I could write every day for the rest of my life, complete every novel I’ve ever even thought about writing, and complete anthologies of short stories on every topic under the sun but what would it all matter if I don’t know, think, feel, believe that I’m good enough? I’m not looking for expostulations of greatness but I’m not looking for indifference either. What am I looking for that is going to take all of this writing and make it worth it?

I could go to college and get the degree that is expected of me but would it really matter if I’m always wondering if this is where I’m supposed to be at this point in my life? Would it really count if I said this to be my calling in life while always wondering about that dream I gave up because my parents said it would be best to go to college?

I don’t want to waste these precious years of my youth on doing what I’m supposed to just to get to a destination that is so fuzzy it might as well even be nonexistent. So many things can change the direction of my life that what I’m trying to get to now might not even be the thing that I want when I get there. I don’t want to look back and regret a moment of this; I’m terribly anxious to see how the rest of my life is going to turn out.

So I won’t. I won’t look back and I won’t regret. Every moment is a lesson and if you haven’t learned something then you haven’t lived and it’s better to live with slight guilt at the things you did in the past than to have never lived at all.

Perhaps my life could’ve taken me down a different road but where I am now is the road that I’m on. There is no going back and there is no remorse or apologies for the decisions I’ve made. There is only forward motion because if we stop moving forward than we’re either dead or the equivalent of it.

I’m outies, homes.

M cubed

I think that at certain points in everyone’s lives, we need to write. It doesn’t matter what it’s for, if it’s good or not, if it will ever be read, if it’s grammatically correct with perfect spelling, or if it even makes sense. Follow with me as I take a stroll down metaphorical lane…

It’s as if there is a tub in your head. Things—thoughts, emotions, actions, choices, decisions, dilemmas, loss, change—pour into the tub sometimes at an alarming and overwhelming rate and sometimes at the speed of a dripping faucet. When you write, you’re pulling the plug on the tub and letting loose all of that stuff that’s in your head—that you can’t talk about, that you can’t quite put into words spoken, that you just need to process somewhere other than your head—out.

Me, mostly I write for enjoyment, but I have lots of times where I just need to pull the plug and let everything drain out. It’s been a tough year with what feels like one loss after one disappointment after one tragedy after another. And, as I sit here and think about it, it’s killing me that I can’t find the right words to say so I try writing them instead.

I worry about saying the wrong thing and something that I’ve never really understood until now is what people mean when they say, “I understand what you’re going through.” How? Did you have a relationship identical to mine with the person I care about? I’m pretty sure that one way I’m feeling about losing my grandfather isn’t the same experience as that of my cousins. So what gives me the right to look at other people, friends and acquaintances and strangers and say, “I understand what you’re going through.”? Before, I couldn’t answer this question but now I think I see it a little more clearly.

I think it’s the fact that we’re all feeling the same way, whether you’re losing a grandfather, or a father, or an uncle, or a grandmother, or a family friend. And whether you’re rooting for someone to fight for the will to live or be eased gently out of their suffering, it’s this gut-wrenching pain that this is a good person, this is a person who has lived their life fairly and honestly and deserves, for once in their life, for things to be easy. This is a person who understands that life isn’t easy and they act accordingly, struggling through challenges and overcoming obstacles and now, when they’ve reached the downhill stretch, life should be easy.

And it’s not. It’s not fair and it’s not easy and it’s never nice. But there is that one thread between people who have to watch people they love suffer. So yes, I do understand how you feel.

Going through some of my notes I found this list written on a napkin that I vaguely remember coming up with last year. I’m pretty sure Laura Klein and Amber Gonzales have one as well.

1. work for a large publishing house

2. open my own publishing company

3. get 10 tattoos and 6 piercings

4. live in (for a time) Europe, Washington D.C., California, Washington state, New Orleans, Georgia, New Mexico, Colorado, Alaska

5. be Margaret Mitchell/Tennessee Williams/great Southern writer

6. masters in publishing from GWU

7. speak French, study abroad in France

8. meet Sarah Palin

9. be farmer and/or rancher

10. have maps of every country in the world

11. spend the night in a train station

12. get married in D.C. at the National Botanical Gardens

13. own an MLS team

14. go to a game for every MLS team

15. WORLD CUP!!!

16. have babies

17. get over fear of heights

18. open/work at a bar

19. do triathalon

20. wake up every morning at a place in my life I least expected

What happened to the person I used to be? Can I have her back? I know at points in our lives we give away/lose parts of ourselves but can’t we pick at least one part that we want to keep? And you might say that the part that we lose, we might not need, and we’re making way for a better part to come and blah blah blah, but seriously? There’s definitely some things that I would’ve liked to keep.

Like feeling like a kid. How come I don’t derive the same joy I used to from simple things? And it’s not just something you grow out of because I had this passion for simple pleasures all the way up until my senior year. I still seek out the simple things in life, but they don’t bring me as much joy as they used to. Instead, I only feel dull, like I’m less shiny than the rest of the world for liking old cars that often break down rather than new cars with too many fancy cars that sell for criminal prices. Now I only feel defeated, rather than uplifted, with my simple tastes. At what point did the world suck all my fun out of me and say that I had to play by their rules?

Today I looked around and realized that I don’t have hopes and dreams. I have things that I want, and things I intend to chase after with hard work, and things that I want that I know I probably won’t ever get, but I don’t have things that I dream about. When I think about my future, I get excited and want to be there but at the back of my mind I accept that I might not get there. That doesn’t sound like dreaming to me.

Am I too afraid to step off the path I’ve set for myself? Have I already ruined my chances of dreaming and hoping for the future? What I find myself wanting is a completely different life where I can start over and find these things out. In the dreams that I used to believe in, I left Texas and found a life for myself. Now that I’m in college, I have a plan for myself doing something I’m passionate about and somehow, something doesn’t feel right. I’ll let you know if I find it.

Peace,

M to the third