I’m having this intense flashback right now to this moment right around Christmastime my senior year of college at gvsu. I was sitting on one of our 2 couches (they were SO comfortable; amazing for naps, and I am interminably sad they couldn’t/didn’t follow me to Illinois). I had the coffee table pulled up to the couch and I had dozens of pages of research spread out in front of me. I was listening to classical christmas music on Pandora, and working on what would turn into my 30 page paper on Mental Health in the Media for my argument and analysis class. I remember typing paragraphs, the christmas lights that framed my living room window twinkling in the background, and just feeling so SATISFIED with the world at that moment. I was working hard on something I was passionate about, it was Christmastime, my room mate hadn’t graduated yet and we were about to spend our 3rd christmas season together, I felt confident that I had some really amazing friends in my life, and my future still felt undetermined, but full of hope.
Today, 2 years in the future, I’m sitting a big oval table in my office’s break room, where I snuck in to work on a similarily lengthy paper for my grad class that is due on thursday. The classical christmas music is back, but a lot else has changed.
I’m in Illinois, working towards a Masters. I have a cat instead of a room mate, and most of my good friends are now separated by miles and continents and time zones. My future still lies ahead, as shapable as always, but I have definitely made marks in it. Indelible marks that will inevitable shape the path of where I go next. I still feel hopeful that I will do amazing things with my life, although the next 4 years or so are a lot more mapped out right now than they were that chilly night in my apartment in Allendale, MI.
I miss that feeling of promise, though. The satisfaction with my work, my skills, and the thought that I could absolutely whatever I wanted to. That I could MAKE IT WORK, no matter what. I believed in myself then, a whole lot.
Not that I don’t believe in myself now, because I do. But I think the feeling was a lot more evident in that moment. It infused my spirit, my every waking action. It made me get up in the morning and want to fight the world.
Sometimes lately I’ve been feeling like the world is fighting me.
But thinking back on that moment, just two short years ago, fills me with hope that I am STILL that person. I can have that sense of accomplishment; I can dream big; I can achieve what I set out to do.
I am the same person I was two years ago; but at the same time, I have changed so very much.
