In many ways, this is a follow-up to my (semi) recent '7 Years' post. In that post I discussed how impactful living in IV through the past 7 years has been. This post is a bit different. It all came about in a bathroom.
Recently I was in the restaurant/brewery that I used to work in and I went to the men's bathroom to poop. While on the toilet, my mind came to the sentence 'How did I get here?' It has been just four months since I was serving food there in order to make a living, walking from my house in Isla Vista, without a car or a credit card. In many respects, it still felt like I was floundering and I knew that I needed something more. Fast forward four months and so much has changed. I am now a marketing automation specialist at a company with over 600 employees, living in the hills of Goleta, commuting to work, and paying for things with essentially only my credit card. In just a summer really, all of this has changed, and it is only now, in retrospect, that I feel like I am at a place where I can really process through the way that this leaves me.
In many respects this was a long summer with different emotions than I have felt lately. June and July flew by whereas August felt like several months itself. Even when I think back to this one simple month it seems like many months of life passed by. And now September has picked up a frenetic pace. It is strange to think through the things that I care about now and how different it is. I still have good friends, friends whom I pursue and relationships that I carefully nurture. Meanwhile, I like feeling like an adult finally. Sure, having a job by no means is what makes someone an adult, but it is a plethora of different things, including the job, general pace of life, the rhythm, even feeling like my emotions have leveled out a bit. (I say that not as a negative, keep in mind that for like three years it kind of felt like I had not emotions). Now there is a girl that I have a crush on, not knowing what to do with it, I have love for fewer friends and not being as spread out feels great, I write poetry and having a healthy outlet to process through who I am is incredibly useful, I am a vital part of a team and while sometimes the vital part feels like a lie, I know that I am valued at least at one place. I guess that balance is probably one thing that is true of my life now. For the past three years I felt crooked and disjointed and while I was still doing good here and there, I largely did not know or even at times recognize myself. Now, I know who I am.
I am weird, very silly, fiercely loyal to a fault, a thinker yet not to the extent that my head gets stuck in the clouds, I am exceptionally nerdy, I sometimes do not know what to say, but I also will defend those who need defense. I am also much more honest than I used to be; I just don't have any desire to hide who I am anymore. I am far from perfect, and up front about that pretty quickly; indeed, I am not even up to my own standard, but I am growing. I desire to be better tomorrow than I was today, and better still the next day. I try to be grateful for what others do for me, and more so, for opportunities to help others. I am often selfish, lazy, and sometimes uncreative, but more often I crave creativity. I am still and always will be someone who loves Jesus and tries to do what is right by Him. I am intensely skeptical, but that often serves to make me more intense in whatever I do (thought occasionally it also leads me to not do things that I should be doing).
Honestly I did not know that this post would turn into this, but as I wrote, I need some time to process through the previous three months as the season shifts and pumpkin everything emerges. But what a four month span it has been. These days I feel my age more than before, not just less energy than I used to have, but more motivation to use the energy well, productively, and creatively. I am not perfect, but I am committed to making the world around me better. Let us pursue life together.
For the sake of nostalgia, I will end this blog like I would have in college.
~Good Luck and Good Eats
