Today marks one year since we said goodbye to my gran, but it doesn’t feel like a year. The last couple days – hell, couple weeks, even – I’ve found myself getting so emotional over the most trivial things. Things that, simply put, just don’t matter. I’ll admit to being an emotional person, anyway, I mean, aren’t we all sometimes? I find myself stressing over person A who said this, or person B who doesn’t think I can do this, or person C who doesn’t even know me and thinks they can make judgments about my life, and lately, I’ve found myself at a breaking point. I’ve worked hard over the last year to come back out of my shell and surround myself with some of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. I’ve worked hard to be myself again, and to try new things so that the things I once thought were so scary seem just a little less so. And… I think if gran and I were still able to have our Saturday chats, she’d know all this, because I would have been gushing to her. About new friends and new prospects. About my new job. About the new people I’ve let into my heart who have been kind enough to let me into theirs…
…and she’d be proud. She’d be so proud, you guys, because I struggled for so long trying to fit into someone else’s box because I was afraid of what would happen if I stepped out of it. I didn’t want to create waves. Life, stagnant and miserable, was less scary than everything else I’d grown accustomed to.
She’d be so proud to see me out of that box and stretching my wings a bit, and – in as much a way as we can amidst this pandemic – rejoining the world and allowing myself to be happy. Because I just… I just wasn’t, guys. But she knew I was working on it. She knew, and she always had a few choice words or a story from her childhood to make me feel better. She always knew exactly what to say, and we’d talk and talk about anything and everything until one of us had to hang up because our phone was going to die.
I miss those chats, and I miss her.
But I’ve realized something.
The moment we are born into this world, we have an expiration date. We have this finite amount of time here, and then we’re done, and we move on to something else. But… we also have infinite possibilities with what we can do with that time. We can decide how we spend it, we can decide who we spend it with, we can learn new things and travel to new places. These are our choices. We can decide what matters and what doesn’t. And if we don’t make the right choices, if we don’t choose to be happy and spend that time with people who love us, who will laugh with us and lift us up when we need it, then what the hell are we doing here, exactly? What’s the point of having this time if we don’t do something with it?
I think I was making the wrong choices before. I was letting the wrong things and the wrong people influence how I chose to use my time… and sometimes, I think I slip back into that mindset. I let myself get upset over the wrong things and the wrong people, and the wrong choices made. Things that don’t matter, or people only see in me what they want to see. And I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. But I do know what my gran would say to something like that. She’d say it’s a load of bullshit. And then she’d say something to make me laugh and remind me everyone makes mistakes – even someone as fabulous as her – and that I have plenty of time to take things in another direction. Things in nature die off in the fall and winter and are reborn in the spring. They don’t have the ability to affect what happens to them as time passes, but we do.
Everything boils down to time; how we use our time, who we devote it to, what we take from it, who we love and who we allow to love us, healing, change… grief. It’s all time and choices, and we’re not all going to process that in the same way. And that’s okay. It’s okay to take time to figure out what you want to do with your own time. It’s okay to take time to heal, or time to grieve. But take it. Don’t waste it.
It’s been a year… and in that year, I’ve done so much and changed so much. But this is one of those things where time feels like time is moving just a little slower. And that’s okay, too. Gran taught me that.
Credits:
[Shape]mine
[Head][LeLUTKA]Irina
[Body][The Shops]Legacy Mesh Body Special Edition (1.3)
[Skin][Go&See]Hope (Buff)
[Brows][Gloom.]Lexi Perfect Brow
[Lips][Top1 Salon]HD Glass Set
[Eyes][Zibska @ Vanity Event]Lyssa Eyemakup (03)
[Headpiece/Orbit/Shoulder][Zibska @ Vanity Event]Lyssa
[Hair][Tram @ Collabor88]K0328 (hud C)
[Dress][pixicat]Valentina dress (cream)
[Pose][KimiArtt]Sad
[Tune][Starship – Sara]
I Promise I Know What I'm Doing 