Choose what makes you feel most alive
I've been wanting to write this letter for the past 10 days. I keep sitting down, staring at the title, starting to type only to erase it all, and continue to stare at the blinking cursor, unable to get the words out.
I want to write something uplifting for you guys. Something that makes you feel better after you have read it. I want to tell you how I've been eating Nutella toast for breakfast, without feeling guilty, and how much joy that gives me.
I want to tell you that I'm happy in my body despite having gained 5 pounds over the winter, and despite the fact that I'm getting short of breath really easily these days, and that this should worry me, but somehow it doesn't.
I want to tell you that this season of my life is a season where it looks like all my dreams are coming true, and how much that exhilarates and frightens me.
I want to tell you that, for the first time in my life, I have begun to understand that we have a choice. We really, truly do. We can choose joy. We can choose to be happy. We can choose to be annoyed.
Circumstances around us only have the power to make us feel frustrated/angry/sad if we let them.
I've heard that countless times, but I never got it. Not until now. And I'm still failing countless times to make a choice myself, and let other people/traffic/work/bad weather choose my mood for me.
But there are now times where I take over the driver's seat. Where I tell that annoying person at work that they don't get to ruin my day. They can try to bug me, but they won't succeed. (Only I tell them in my head, not with my words. Otherwise it would be counter-productive.)
I want to tell you that I am learning something that I didn't understand until now: that we can love something, and still hate it sometimes, too. I didn't give writing a real shot for so long because I knew how hard it was. How frustrating it was. How much sweat, tears, and over-caffeination it costs. And I thought that that must mean I didn't love it enough, and therefore, it wasn't right for me.
But I was wrong. Love isn't always easy. Love can be hard work, it can drive us nuts, it can make us almost despair.
I want to tell you that I know that I love writing because nothing makes me feel more alive. Nothing makes me feel prouder than when I have managed to put into words what's going on inside my head. My thoughts are so messy, such a tangle of confusing and overwhelming emotions, that it fills me with a great sense of accomplishment when I manage to get them untangled and onto the page in front of me.
I want to tell you how I used to exercise because I thought I had to. After all, I was a girl, and girls should do anything in their power to look attractive, right? So I forced myself to jog even though I hated it, I dragged my sorry ass to bootcamps even though I don't like being yelled at, and I hated my body like I was taught to do.
I dyed my hair because my natural colour wasn't pretty enough, I put on make-up because my mother told me I looked better with it, and I starved myself because nobody likes chubby girls.
I want to tell you how these actions didn't make me fell better; they made me feel dead inside. I was worried about going swimming because of how I looked in a bathing suit, and because my hair colour might wash out when I got my hair wet. I was worried that boys wouldn't like me without make-up because I had pimples and I thought my thick foundation was successfully hiding them (it didn't). I was worried that if I did or said the wrong thing, people wouldn't love me anymore.
I want to tell you how ashamed I was for far too long. How trapped I felt. How the people-pleasing sucked the life out of me.
I want to tell you how much better we deserve: how we can truly learn to love ourselves, ditch the make-up and dyes and diets if we want, and become the beautiful, wild women we were always meant to be.
We can have Nutella toast if we damn well please, we can marry people deemed inappropriate for us by others, we can have zero children or six, we can shave our heads or dye our hair in all the colours of the rainbow, we can wear bikinis despite our cellulite and big tummies, or go skinny-dipping to feel the soft water everywhere. It's never too late to work towards our dreams, even if that means going back to school at 50 or getting a divorce because we realize we never loved our spouse. We can choose to be alive, by living our own version of a wild and satisfying life.
I want to tell you all that, but I can't find the right words. So I'm telling you about what I want to tell you, because sometimes, that's all we can do.
xoxo Miriam
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Vol. 50