It’s funny how quickly people can change without even realizing it. Maybe it’s an age thing. Maybe it’s just from experience. Or maybe it’s human nature. Whatever it may be, change is the only constant factor in any life. I’ve changed…more than I ever wanted to and I didn’t even have a choice.
I’m so different now than I was a few years ago that it’s kind of scary. I used to be so passionate about things. I argued. I protested. I wrote. Writing. It used to be my thing. More than my thing, it was who I was. It was my very soul down on paper. It used to flow to easily for me…like a song stuck in my head that my heart just knew. Now I struggle with it everyday and I don’t know how to get it back.
I started this website as an online portfolio for my writing. As something to show potential employers just how much I was capable of, but it turned into something else. I let the homepage be a blog, a blog that initially was only to showcase my struggles and triumphs within my career as a writer but then something happened. Life. I posted a deeply personal blog during a not so great day and it felt like relief. To be so public with my feelings, my joy, my pain…my life. So I posted another personal blog…and another and another.
Then something BIG happened. One decision,one moment that forever changed the course of my life. So I packed up my shit, bandaged up my severely dismantled heart and moved out West. An experience, that while difficult, changed me more than I could ever have imagined. The sad part is that somewhere in that year of ups and downs and East and West, I lost myself. I lost that connection to my soul. My wants. My needs. That connection that made me who I was.
The crazy thing is that now, things are falling together in my life in such a way that seems almost predetermined. The way I’m assuming life plays out for normal people, which if you’ve read any of my blogs, you would know that my life is anything but normal. But even now, with this new found stability and independent turn my life is taking, I have this insane urge to take the money I’ve responsibly put away as “emergency funds” and just go. Go somewhere I’ve never been and just explore the world. Take nothing but a backpack and cash and gain the kind of experiences that money could never buy you. I mean, I could consider the urgency of losing the very essence that is me in the “grownup world” as a major emergency which would then justify blowing my savings…I’m just saying. I think people could understand that. Right?
Jennifer M Lima 