You know the feeling.
The last gasp you take before your life changes forever.
Human nature is to resign ourselves to expectations we don't even know we have. Most people wake up and simply expect their day to be same as their last, or exciting and new, but in a way you expect the exciting and new. Starting a new job or going on a field trip counting the steps of your legs, the shortest they will ever be. What happens after the unexpected? What happens after the last gasp you take before your life changes forever. Change as in, different than the sketch of it you make when your fifth grade english teacher asks you to write a letter to your future self. You don't know your future self, but you like to think you do. You like to think you know your career, relationship status, all the things that will make up a new yet aged version of you. But you don't. You don't know if your second semester that is only a week away will completely change because of a global pandemic. How. Can. The. Future. Change? It hasn't happened yet. When the future does the funny thing it does and ignores your life plans what do you do? After the last gasp before your life changes forever, what do you do? Most people go through their template of the five stages of grief. Deny that your cookie cutter vision of tomorrow could be anything but what you envisioned. Burst into your most pure form of unadulterated anger, the type you have when you did everything right, but you look to the night sky and the stars still don't align. Bargain with god, yourself, your universe. Whoever you need to because anything is worth life happening the way you wanted to. Depression. Self Explanatory. Sometimes, someday, somewhere, you get to acceptance. You build new expectations some of which will no doubt take you through the stages again but you get there. You are flesh and blood, you are not a force of nature. When you accept your work as flesh and blood. When you accept that expecting is an art older than you. When you accept. Then you will grow, you will continue, and you will do it all over again.
My life was happiness at every corner. Eye contact was an opportunity to smile at a stranger. Laughter was the soundtrack that carried me through a difficult homelife and relentless bullying. The sun always shone even when I couldn't see it. Genetics, life experiences, chemical imbalances, jesus christ himself. Whatever was the source of my majorly depressive disorder and generalized anxiety. Whatever was the source of my life after my last gasp of joy before the future began. Whatever it was, I did not expect it. My form of acceptance comes in so many outlets. Psychiatry. Medication. Pure will. This blog. I accepted that often happiness is not consumable in a way I can take it like most people do. But I did not accept there was nothing I could do to make my life better after my diagnoses. I write about the things that touch me because I know they touch quieter people who need a voice. I risk my everything because that is how I feel anything. Me and you are not too happy with not being too happy. Me and you will accept that our expectations are the death of us. But me and you---we're gonna figure it out, we're gonna live the lives of our future the way it is not the way we expect it, we're gonna thrive.
this post was inspired by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCNW9jO7EyM
check it out, stick around the channel, learn something