What a year.
Only just a few days away from being two months in, and it’s already been a complete whirlwind.
My brick and mortar business is open, and things have been progressing, and life has been happening full speed ahead.
As my twenties are starting to get closer and closer to being over with each progressing year, I am actively working on setting goals for myself, and chasing them down to the finish line.
Self discovery and acceptance has been a big part of that as well.
Who I am.
What I am.
What I want.
Who I want.
I didn’t answer a lot of these questions for myself until this year.
That is to say, if I did, they were always inconclusive. I would toy with all of the answers for awhile, but then lose confidence in whatever had been decided.
For whatever reason this year feels exceptionally liberating. I’ve always been told that 19 year segments hold a unique significance.
2019 seems to have some weighty significance on my life, thus far.
I’ve felt like this year more than ever, I know exactly who I am as a person, and what I want out of life, what I want to do, what I want to become.
I’ve always held back from feeling things and saying things when they would have had maximum impact, and never fully taking the chance on leaving myself vulnerable to either failure or success.
It was always too late.
Fear.
Fear is crippling, and it has over the years, crippled me from ever fully experiencing anything.
In life, I have always been too afraid of failure.
In love, too afraid of being hurt.
As clichéd as it all sounds, just over a week ago, it was like I had a life changing epiphany of sorts, and everything came pouring down on me all at once.
For over ten years, I’ve kept myself coiled up, terrified of letting what I felt ever seep through the cracks.
When I was ten years old, my mother became terribly, terribly ill, to the point that she was bedridden for seven years.
Though at the end of those seven years she miraculously recovered, during that time I had partially raised my four younger siblings.
I had almost daily held my breath, knowing that each day could be my mother’s last.
I never fully learned how to process pain, hurt, or even love.
To love someone was to leave yourself open to pain, hurt, disappointment.
After a series of relationships I never could invest in, past a certain threshold, I never wanted to trust anyone, or truly feel anything for anyone, lest the inevitable happen.
Without going on too much further about this, what I did want to finally come full circle to, is that there were a few, very few, exceptions.
Finally I was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together that had been there all along, neatly lined up for me, but I had been too afraid to see how they fit together.
And finally, I feel that I am able to tear down and pass through the wall that I created around myself, where I was isolated and afraid.
I am no longer held back by fear of the unknown. The only way to know what lies ahead is to experience it, and live it. To let things happen and be comfortable accepting failure, pain, disappointment, and sorrow.
But also the highs, the successes, the great loves, the passions, and all of the things that you can only experience if you are open to their counterparts.
I’m learning to take the good and the bad in stride, and trying to peel back the layers I’ve created, and leave myself bare and exposed.
Over a decade of raw, pent up emotion, hit me all at once, and it felt liberating to finally let it go.
I don’t know if it’s happened this way because of the many hurdles and milestones I’ve crossed and continue to cross, if it’s simply reaching a certain age of maturity where I am able to process things I had previously been unable, or if it’s because I had finally reached my threshold and nothing more could be held back…
…but what I do know, is this:
Being vulnerable is the most human thing we can be, and I am finally, finally vulnerable again.
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