Personal Growth in Like No One Is Reading

I feel like spring is extra-appropriate this year. I’m not religious and I don’t celebrate Easter in any way, but this really is a time of renewal, rebirth.

I took my vaccinated self on a trip last week to visit three of my most dearest, and also vaccinated, friends. Five nights and six days of literal lovefest. It was like coming home on a cold winter night and snuggling up in a warm blanket with someone you love. Or… it was just like coming home. Every minute of every day just felt so right and good and healthy, loving and accepting and just… being. Never have I felt so comfortable just existing, being who I am without feeling weird, awkward, or anxious. And each of those three people gave me all of these wonderful feelings in their own unique ways so it was like getting hit with a triple-dose, six-day-long love bomb.

And every night, I got to go back to my hotel room and have my time, that quiet, peaceful hour just before bed where I can breathe and process all of the things that bombarded me all day long. Wonderful, amazing, beautiful things! But bombarded. Bombarded is overwhelming no matter what and I need time to recover from it. And the people I love respected that and… well. That means everything. Like, I was welcome to stay at their house, but they understood why I preferred not to and didn’t make me feel weird about it and that kind of almost feels like the first time that’s ever happened to me. I’ve never felt like, “I’m different and that’s okay.” Always more like, “Don’t be weird, don’t be weird, don’t be weird.”

I wanted the week to be a sort of hard reset for myself. I’ll confess to having fallen apart a bit in the last couple of months. I mean, I quit smoking, and I can honestly say that all of that could have been a hell of a lot worse. I just… quit. So, yeah, I was having some mental health issues around that and life and my swiftly-upcoming relocation from a very, very tiny town to Chicago. Things started to feel a little out of control and I started to spiral a bit. More than I ever let on, really. I felt like I had a handle on it, and I did, obviously. But it got a little more bad than anyone knew and I knew I needed to do something big to pull myself out of it. Like, impulse buying on Amazon was not cutting it, ya’ll.

And then I got my first vaccine and then they got their vaccines and I knew that a trip to the city was just what I needed. I cannot express the way these people make me feel. I have no previous experience to reference. They love me so well. They genuinely care for me and my well-being and they took such good care of me while I was there. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner every, single day - and on time! I went to sleep easily and woke up bright and early every morning. Being vaccinated and feeling pretty damn awesome about that, we ventured out to thrift stores (ohhh how I’d missed them!) and took a walk to the beach and just… existed out in the world like two almost-normal-but-thankfully-not-quite-normal (because normal is boring) human beings. It felt so good! I felt so good!

I feel myself… becoming. Something. Something better, something more. I am feeling so much personal growth, understanding and accepting myself more, and acknowledging the things that still need work. I’m learning how to control my emotional reactions to the world around me, recognizing when my brain is working from old information to trigger those emotional reactions and knowing that they are completely unnecessary. Then, the “emotional” reaction of increased heart rate, anxiety, etc., is just a mild, temporary, physical discomfort. I feel like I can overwrite that old information with the new information, like, “Hey, brain, save this new file. Yes, overwrite the old one, it no longer applies.” And then, in the future, if that trigger occurs again, I will not have such an extreme reaction to it, if any at all. I have done this with other triggers, so I know it works. I just didn’t realize I was doing it, not in this active sort of way.

Anyway! I’m moving to Chicago! Target move-in date: June 1st! I just really need to find a job first. Working on it and I know it’s all going to work out just how it’s supposed to. I feel re-energized, excited for the future, and genuinely hopeful, which is goddamn nice after this last year.