thirty-one

This year, I was in two of my best friends’ weddings. I backpacked in Michigan with my bestie. I solo camped in Iowa under a sky of fireworks. I wandered one of the world’s largest bookstores, dipped my hands in the cold Pacific Northwest ocean, watched women’s basketball reach its peak from Madison to Chicago to Portland to Cleveland.

I made new friends. I finally found footing at my job. I started rock climbing. I bought a new car. I sang karaoke. I saw my favorite comedian.

I took a chance on someone, fell really hard, and got my heart broken. I cried in front of a lot of people who’d never seen me cry, and soaked in the beautiful irony that even though my heart had never hurt so bad, I’d never felt more loved.

I got my first-ever pedicure. I started parting my hair down the middle and, goddammit, Gen-Z’s right. I went to a dog’s first birthday party. I held my childhood best friend’s child for the first time. I played arcade games with a cute groomsman. I had A CORGI as a groomsman!

I biked to work. I biked twenty miles over and over again. I did six months of physical therapy for a strained Achilles tendon. I bruised my legs at-home-sugaring. I tried to take up running again and remembered that I hate running.

I became a Chappell Roan disciple. I started wearing more colorful clothes and leaning more curiously into my femininity and began to ask myself how I can enjoy this body for everything it is instead of hating it for what it’s not. Can these limbs and these curves and these muscles be a place of joy rather than a battleground?

I cried a lot. I grieved. I doubted and seethed and raged and didn’t read very much and meditated less. I went into the woods searching for inner peace and was met time and time again with the jagged edges of my broken heart. A once-in-a-lifetime cicada event drowned out by shrill what-ifs and too-lates and not-enoughs. I bawled over a baby bird who’d fallen out of their nest because omg life is so unfair. I spent months with knots in my stomach. I did my best to feel my feelings but still ran away from them just as often as I let them in.

I went on a solo road trip to Colorado. I saw the Milky Way. I camped in the desert. I breathed thin, thin air and watched moose and marmots and elk thrive above the tree line. I set my greedy eyes on every curve in every road, on every angle of every mountain.

I tried new things. I made mistakes. I learned hard lessons. I said things I wouldn’t say again and things I still wouldn’t take back.

I wrote a lot of songs, screamed into a fair share of pillows, and cursed at the sky every time someone said, “you’re doing everything right.”

I laughed really hard. I set my sights on the future. I started writing again, started dreaming. I gave myself grace and space and the luxury of time.

I set out to live a life this year and it was fun and messy and hard and confusing and gratifying. I’m not the same as I was a year ago; I’m more me than I’ve ever been. I set out to learn the shape of me, to learn all the contours and edges, the sources of light and pockets of darkness, and it turns out this place is spacious and wild and ever-changing. I did a lot of things scared and met parts of myself I was scared to know.

Turns out, there was nothing to be afraid of.

And so as we turn the page from thirty-one to thirty-two, let that be the refrain I carry with me, the lesson of thirty-one: There’s nothing to be afraid of.