growing (say yes)

A little while ago, Andrew told me to say yes. It was early morning and I didn't want to get up, I didn't want to start the day, I didn't want to study, I didn't want to continue this trajectory of going through the day that I'd adopted in the past months. I said no, and he said yes, and helped me get up. That day was a hard one, one of the most difficult I've had, and after the intensity of it had subsided a bit, I decided I would apply that thought to everything--saying yes, yes to being happier, yes to dissipating this all-consuming anxiety, yes to being okay with certain circumstances, yes to being thankful, yes to putting my idealized principles to real practice.

Since then, maybe I've had sporadic spurts of being true to that sentiment, but mostly I've been waiting. Waiting for the sleepless nights to pass, for my self-pity to cease, for my bouts of meanness to stop. I didn't take care of myself very well, and I haven't liked who I've been lately. Constantly working, isolating myself, wallowing, putting him through it, repeating myself without progress. In retrospect, I don't regret the way I've handled things. I don't think I could have come to where I am without it. Finding myself without the kind of control I've closely guarded all my life has made me think about what it really means to own your own life.

For me it has a lot to do with summoning the strength to give into weakness. A few weeks ago I woke up with morning dreariness clinging so tightly to me I couldn't do much of anything. I wrote to Stephen, because my brother has no illusions about me and there is never any shame, and though I later assured him I was fine as I usually am after the morning phase passes, he wrote back. He told me I should go home for spring break, and the sudden, irrepressible urge to do that was overwhelming. I'd been planning on staying in Boston, and pushing through the loneliness, being stronger than I have been. The incredible sense of relief I felt at the prospect of home made me realize how tense I had been. He told me to give him the dates, and found plane tickets for me himself, something that I would normally have done and something he would not have normally done for me, having always been the older brother to push me to be independent when everyone else wanted to hold my hand. At the time, it didn't feel good to need that kind of reliance. I called Andrew to tell him about it and burst into tears in the process, something I'm more prone to than I like to admit. Lately, anything remotely poignant or reminsicent or emotional has the potential to call forth tears. I felt better afterwards, and he has never perceived me as weak for needing him, which has been so conducive to changing how I view myself and relationships between people.

That was the first of things that I started to do for myself to get out of this slump. Another was to actively seek the company of people I love, or at least, to stop so consciously being alone. I realize now that I can’t blame isolation on anyone except myself. Very soon I won’t have these wonderful friends around all the time, and being with them in small ways over the past weeks has made me remember, really remember, that there are things other people can do for me that I can’t do for myself and vice versa. Once he envisioned a time for me when “upon reaching out, you will find others already extended towards you.” I am finding this more and more true, in the people who have really meant something to me.

Another thing I started to do was running in the mornings. As of late waking up insanely early against my sheer will and against my body’s tiredness has been the quintessential emblem of my frustration and anxiety with things beyond my control. So I decided that one, I need to have some sort of control over my physical and emotional self, and two, in a related sense, I need to have more control on how my environment affects me. I haven’t run while at college for a couple reasons. Mostly, I’m lazy. But I think I could’ve gotten over that if I really wanted to, and it has more to do with the fact that running outside has been so closely tied to my life in California, reminiscent of those after-school days at Bellarmine, in warm, lovely Bay Area weather. Freshman year here I was pretty homesick, and despite how much I liked it here, running in the cold would have made the contrast between the West and East Coasts all the more distinct, and I didn’t want to stir those sharp sentiments. This time around, I knew I couldn’t be so bound, and that I should make something new. And it came to encompass my life here rather than there, dependent on this time and experience, at the same time that it was just a part of me, no need for a sense of anywhere in particular. The first day I went out it was gray and drizzly, and my hair was soft from the light rain afterwards. The hot water from the shower felt cool against hot skin, and my body ached from the tightening of loose muscles and loosening of tight feelings. Mornings are not so hard this way, and are gaining a lovely air.

Around this time I also started reading Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” for English, and I finished it on the plane ride to California. What an amazing, amazing book, one of those simultaneously life-reflecting, life-changing books that will never loosen its grip on you. There’s more I want to share about it, but maybe for another entry; my experience with its story seems to be a story itself. What was most significant in relation to all of this was that it was the first time in a long while that indulging in fiction felt liberating and not, as it has felt lately, limiting. Hard to describe, but it was the comfort of passions that are forever. And I think about how certain things can be forever in spite of what everyone tells you, because they come to mind and heart over and over again. This makes impending goodbyes a little less permanent, my fears of forgetting a little less frightening.

Most of the time, these things take a lot of effort and I'm tired, but there are moments when it comes naturally and I work for those. I often lapse back into the me of the past few months, but try to ground myself in these new and different days. So, home I went and home I am, and when I return I hope I’ll bring back with me a slightly better person.