It's the last post of 2014. It still doesn't feel like it, but it is.
So much of what I do is based on emotions--I even started this blog post about how it doesn't feel like the end, yet it is. The truth is so often the opposite of what we feel. Yes, it's denial and stubborness all in one. But it's also something else--it's remembering, it's allowing yourself the luxury of feeling. It is living.
I go around talking about my feelings and highlighting people's emotions, analyzing reactions of characters in stories and movies. Because that is the very thing that helps me thrive. Personal relationships. I understand the world through emotions. Affection. Passion. Inspiration. Thought and action that ignite notes of joy, nuances of sadness, complex shades of anger. I feel things because I'm alive.
And right now, I feel many things: nostalgia, gratefulness, contentment, anxiety, and hope.
I am nostalgic because one of my Biweekly friends, Heide, just recently posted a list of 40 things she has learned in the past two years, many of which have been learned the hard way (except all of the food and cooking stuff, I think, those are always good things to learn). I'm not close to Heide but our friendship is still growing. We have a different relationship because she's so different from a lot of my other friends. She is quirky without even trying, refreshingly odd and youthful, and she annoys me just as much as I love her because of how gut-wrenchingly honest she can be sometimes. As I read her list, laughing at each joke that I understood, smiling at every heartfelt piece of advice embedded within each lesson, and remembering the moments for which I was present that made it to the top 40 list, I grew so much fonder of her in that minute that it took me to go from 1 to 40. Then I hit the last lesson that she wrote: "Time is limited. Might as well spend it with good friends."
That one bit by Heide reinforced two things I learned this semester, and for them I am definitely grateful. Kendall touched upon the first one already: our clock counts down, not up. One of the things we can be certain about is that our days are numbered. As such, each second you have is precious and should not be wasted. So it only makes sense to spend each second with people you love and people who love you. Which leads to the second lesson: Anyone else is not worth your time. It's simple: the people who want to stay in your life will stay, and make the effort to stay. The people who don't will leave. Be thankful for the time they've given you but do not spite them for fading away from your life because, like I said, everyone is better off surrounding themselves with people who actually want to be there. This has taken a lot longer for me to learn than the first, but I have learned it and, like most things that you do end up learning after a bit of a struggle, it's a novel liberating feeling. Just like letting go.
And in that letting go, you are also granting yourself yet another luxury of being alive: the ability to choose what matters to you.
A college education, I've been told, not only teaches you how to think but also what to think about. The things that matter to you are important because you make them so. If you cared just enough, then you care enough without needing anyone else's justification or defense or validation--simple as that. And if you don't care, that's fine, so long as you care about other things too. Live without caring for anything or anyone and you live a pretty empty, colorless life. The same goes for personal aspects of your life, I think: you are what you make yourself to be, and so in that same vein, you determine your limits, your strengths, your worth.
And so I am content to choose to make the relationships I create and strengthen with others matter to me. I choose to care about the past, the present, and the future all at once. People are really made to love, and that's something you learn only after having experienced different types of love at different levels in different circumstances, all unconditionally. And the best place to start is with family and friends, and definitely friends who have become family to you.
But because my time is nearly ending with this particular stage of my life, I can't help but be anxious. I know that things don't just end after a chapter finishes. I know that I will always have my family, and that my best friends will always be my best friends. What I worry about is me: will I still be me? Yes and no, of course. I hope to be my best yet am anxious about how I will change, because I definitely will. New experiences bring new challenges and new challenges are opportunities for growth. So change I will. And of course that's something to be anxious about. It means that in addition to the unfamiliar environment, the unfamiliar circumstances, we are forced to accept a new and unfamiliar version of something that we should know the very best: ourselves.
Though Life manages to throw us the worst of curveballs, it also gives us the best pitches--and definitely everything in between. So I can't help but be hopeful as well. It's almost a giddy feeling, actually. The inevitability of something new and different is exciting despite its jarring newness against what has been the set routine for a couple of years now.
All of these feelings can be contradictory but, like I said, they tell me that I am alive. Jen, everything is working perfectly fine in your head and in your heart because of the very fact that you are confused and emotional and feeling everything all at once. You are alive and well and very human indeed. And I can't help but smile because I would not choose to be anything else.
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