when you run, make sure you run to something and not away from, cuz lies don't need an aeroplane to chase you down

It has been a long time since I have been able to write. The will was not there. The anxiety was. This summer ended up teaching me quite a lot about what I want from my life. While it could probably have been learned in a much easier way, I have never been one to find the simpler manner of performing a task. That being said, I am entering a new period of growth in my life. I can actually feel it. Isn't that strange? I can feel the darkness that has been within me for the last weeks and months begin to lift.

I recently turned the tender age of 25 and just before that turning, I felt an intense heartbreak. My heartbreak resulted from the fact that not everyone is as kind as I wish them to be. Not everyone takes into consideration the feelings of other human beings when they decide to act. It will never cease to feel like a blow to my heart when I realize that not everyone wants to help more people than they have hurt in their lives. Even someone who cares about another person may not take their feelings into consideration and that is just appalling to me on a most basic level. I try to extend that courtesy to anyone--not only people I care about--and, yet, some people cannot even do that. Anyway, the point is, I learned a very difficult lesson recently. It has been especially difficult because I am simultaneously transitioning from being a student to an instructor. My friends have all moved away to pursue their goals in life and I am left without the people who understood me the most. After two years of graduate school with them, and living in the same town as them, I am without them. I am without an incredibly strong support system. And it is precisely when I feel I may need them the most.

But isn't that what life does? It ironically leaves you alone when you must face a difficult transition period in your life? I think that perhaps it is building my strength. I feel myself becoming more sure of who I am and what I demand from this life even though I am without my core support system. Sure, my parents are still here and one or two friends have remained in the area, but I do not see them everyday as I once did.

I guess what I mean to say in all of this is that I have been knocked out and forced to reflect and alter some of my beliefs and thoughts and assumptions about this life I am living and the people that occupy this world with me. I had to learn the hard way that perhaps I should be a little bit more scrutinizing in my relationships with people. I should be a little bit more cautious. I am redefining love for myself and transforming it into something like bell hooks writes about--she says that love should be the endeavor to foster one's own or an other's spiritual growth (in all about love: new visions). I want all of my relationships, whether platonic or romantic, to foster a sense of growth spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally. There are very few relationships in my life which do this. I think it's time I began to demand it. Here's the deal: I have turned 25, I am young, but I am not as young as I was. I can feel myself growing and growing in a way that suggests the next years of my life will be the best. I spent my youth trying to figure people and situations and experiences and  the world out. I am now ready to begin to demand what I expect and not just in theory. I have had the wind knocked out of me, but I am ready to proceed. I have endless possibilities to look forward to. I am content in the way my life has played out thus far. I am happy with the job I am currently at. And the research I am doing could be far less rewarding.

I have some astoundingly amazing relationships with some genuinely beautiful people. And I am inspired by those people I have met by chance who remind me that not everyone is as hurtful and inconsiderate as the ones who have facilitated my feelings of heart ache.

sweeter dreams.
k