Youthful Life: X

"The only thing you sometimes have control over is perspective. You don't have control over your situation. But you have a choice about how you view it." Chris Pine Reframing makes the picture different. Reframing is a powerful tool that we have in our arsenals to view our experiences in the ways that we dictate. Reframing let's us craft the narrative, and the story we tell ourselves about our own lives. So much of our lives can be dictated by fear. Fear is paralysis. Fear is a blockade. Fear is holding us back. Fear is not a way to live. Fear prevents us from living. Oh, what our lives could be if we lived in spite of fear. Fear, apprehension, nervousness, and all their dastardly cronies that prevent us for the fullness of life can sometimes be overcome through reframing. We can take a hardship presented to us, and make it small. We can take it is a challenge that will benefit us in the process. We can turn it into something of our own creation. It's taking ...

"Things never go the way you expect them to. That's both the joy and frustration in life. I'm finding as I get older that I don't mind, though. It's the surprises that tickle me the most, the things you don't see coming." Michael Stuhlbarg As a kid I used to spend hours entranced in a daze, dreaming of wonders, possibilities, and opportunities in my own head. I'd imagine my life working as a doctor, delivering babies, and changing lives. Other times it'd be writing books, empowering others through reading, and travelling the world spreading my stories. Soon, reality came flooding back, and things never happened the way I had imagined they would. Life was either more exciting or underwhelming, but never followed the course of the script I had drafted all along. We can plan for life, but life never goes according to plan - at least not ours. And that dissonance between our fantasies and our realities can be jarring, but in it there's a...

Truth - Life is complicated and life is simple. Life is a constant struggle to figure it all out. What's the meaning of life? What is our purpose? What are we meant to do here? Does any of this matter, are those questions irrelevant, and are we significant in any meaningful way? The further we go in life the more we have to wonder what it's all about. Does anyone know? Is it the same for everyone? What am I like this , and how did I end up here? "I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias." Maya Angelou What am I doing with my life ? There's that question that creeps up and threatens to strangle you in its clutches of  existential dread from time to time. It's that meta moment where you are painfull se...

Truth - Once you leave home for the first time, nothing is ever the same. The change that occurs after high school and during college truly is profound. In retrospect, each time I've left it's almost been longer and longer since I returned home. My tolerance for being away from the place where I feel most safe, comfortable, and loved has grown considerably and the lingering feeling that being anywhere else is wrong remains. I wonder if that little notion of uneasiness ever subsides. How do you make a new place home when all you already have monachopsis?   "Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone." Paul Tillich Monachopsis is defined as the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. For this new stage in my life, it has become even more relevant. I don't really know how to describe it....

Truth - There's no way that you can ever fully be prepared for the real world. We live in bits and pieces of it as we move through life. No one actually gets to experience it in its entirety. The little sliver though that we do get to live through is more than enough. Each day we enter and exit different parts of the microcosms that make up their terrifyingly beautiful world. It's a great big world out there. It asks us to figure it out but never stays the same. You know those nights that people talk about having hit the bottle a little too hard, that's how life can be sometimes; stumbling through the dark, slightly intoxicated. This is sobering up.  " The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love" William Sloane Coffin Jr. To be quite honest, I don't quite comprehend how people make friends outside of college. It's now that I'm out of my little universe(ity) that I realize how facilitated the experienc...

The 20s are all about challenging yourself. Experience can go a long way. There are some things you don't need to try to know that you won't like them while there are others you could do to dabble with before writing them off. College is all about experimentation. All those alleged "phases" and "benders" people go on come with good reason, simply that it's time to decide for yourself what you want to include in your life. It's good to push yourself outside your comfort zone every once in while to remind yourself you're alive. Play it self and you might just end up stranded in a cabin in the woods (figuratively and literally). Serving as a peer advisor for the bridge program I'm taking part in has definitely been a formative experience for me. The students are may share some similar identities but how they exemplify them speaks volumes about how we are intersections of not only the identities we hold but our experiences. They are such indi...