Wanderlust Strikes Again.

Wanderlust/ˈwändərˌləst/ : A desire to travel to understand one's very existence.

So, for the millionth time I find myself pausing at a fork in the road. Once again, I have to make a decision between awesome and amazing as I begin planning for the chasing of my future self through Europe.

Boohoo. Poor me, right?

The question du jour: Do I put my life in storage again for a couple months and travel around Europe? Or do I try to find an affordable place to live at The Beach, which is like trying to find a needle in a haystack the size of Texas, so that I have a place to come back to? It's not a super tough decision, it's just a quandary. Which is the smarter move for this City Girl? Hmm.

Ships in the Nighttime

"Ships that pass in the night": Often said of people who meet for a brief but intense moment and then part, never to see each other again.

We were two ships passing each other in the nighttime. The odds of us meeting in the first place...well, it was more than coincidence. It was fate. It wasn't meaningless or for nothing. There was a reason. There was purpose. But the thing about two ships passing each other in the night is that nothing is really clear. Everywhere but the spot you're standing in is hazy. It's clouded and difficult to see. While it's amazing to meet someone in the dark of night, it's not ideal. The timing would be better in the daytime. 

Our ships crossed paths in the night a number of times and every time the timing could have been better, except we hadn't met yet or one of us was flying out when the other was flying in or one of us was living out a part of our lives in other countries or states. Whatever the reason, the timing was never quite on. A little bird told me today that our two ships had passed each other, once again, just narrowly missing one another by a day. The funny thing is it wasn't funny, because this is how it's always been: meeting up at the worst possible times or missing each other by mere hours. 

It's amazing to me how many times your ship can pass another for days or months or years without colliding or ever making contact. Makes me wonder how many other ships are out there that I have yet to pass? Will I sail past the last one again? And will it ever be in the daytime?

Lessons in Learning How to Rest, Part Six.

Lesson Six: He said. She said. Cut the chatter.

When I was a little girl I liked to pretend that I was the CEO of a company on the verge of a hostile take-over. I would hold multiple conference calls all day, shouting orders to lower level employees about how "this" was a rush and "that" had to get done by the end of the work day. My favorite part of the fantasy was the conference calls with multiple people where we all dispensed our wisdom on the subject at hand. I had watched my dad hold a number of professional phone calls as a kid, memorizing his every gesture. So, I knew exactly what to say to my imaginary conversational counterparts. Ah yes, conference calls were the best!

Now, however, my life has become one giant conference call. All day long my phone lights up while simultaneously making noise notifying me of the hundreds of people waiting to have a conversation in about fifty different ways. And I have no one to blame but myself for the constant barrage of communication. I wanted it. I was convinced that I needed it. My daily dose of advice, input, the constant clicking of tongues.

I realized this week that my childhood fantasy of talking all day long had become a nightmare. There was no light at the end of the tunnel that constantly reverberated with the hum of a million voices. No peaceful land in sight away from the white noise of conversing. And while my dad taught me the art of making a well delivered phone call, he also gave me good advice last year: "Stop listening to what everyone else has to say and just do whatever it is that YOU wanna do. Cut out the constant chatter, kid." 

So, I finally decided to take his advice this week. One year later, but I'm taking it nonetheless! I've ruthlessly stopped returning phone calls. I answer only the necessary emails in short and concise sentences that don't signal a reply. I've banished my phone to silent mode and have started leaving it in other rooms of the house, out of earshot. I've turned off. I've shut down. I've cut it all out. And I've come to a conclusion: I've known what to do all along, but stubbornly insisted on hearing everyone else out first. I don't need to have endless phone calls day and night in order to make the right decisions for me. But I do need to take a serious break from all the chatter.

Truth and the X factor.

Being a truth teller is a tricky thing. You want to find the right words, the perfect words. You want your voice to be even and steady. You want your point to be made without making the recipient of your words confused or trying to grasp blindly at your concept. 

I am a truth teller. I don't know how good my skill level is, but yesterday there was no mistaking me for anything but a teller of what is true and honest.

Yesterday, I told the truth to a friend. A good friend. A love. And while I was hoping for a different answer from this person, I was so happy to have spoken words that my heart felt. I was relieved to breath out words that made me feel as if I had been hiding a big secret from one of my best friends.

The thing about being a truth teller is that you don't know what will happen when you say the very things you mean. And then once you've said those things you still don't know what will happen. You may get a reaction. You may even lose things or titles. You may get words volleyed back to you. But when both sides have said all the words they have in their arsenal, sometimes there is still an X factor that hovers over you. There is still the unknown of what will come next...

Honesty is the best policy.

Tomorrow I will be spilling my guts. I'm going to be honest. Extremely, openly, gut wrenchingly honest. My hands will probably sweat. In fact, all of me will probably sweat. Most of my sentences are likely to come out jumbled and half won't make sense. I'll throw in a few uh's and um's just to fill those minuscule quiet spaces that comes between words in a sentence. And if I'm lucky, I'll be able to make my point clear. I'll be able to say what I really feel instead of words that are safe and guarded.

I just got truthful with myself this past month. And I don't know which will be more difficult: when I admitted to myself my true feelings or tomorrow when I own up to my desires.

When I finally came to terms with the fact that my heart wanted The Possibility to become a Sure Thing my whole body was shaking. I had worked so hard to close my heart off again. I had become a master of building emotional walls and playing the role of the aloof bystander of love. Nothing I said was serious. Nothing I did made anyone feel too special or wanted. I was a champion at keeping love at arm's length with both arm's tied behind my back. It was the perfect illusion.

That is until my feelings took over my heart and later my mind. I had no control over how much I cared. Most days I've probably cared too much, been too concerned or worried. It wasn't until this week that I realized that all of those things (the feelings, the hoping, the pining) are so sweet. Torturous, but sweet. And while I don't know the outcome of tomorrow's conversation, I know that my heart is in a better place. It's open again.

Italy

So, I've been saying for months now that I want to go to Italy for my birthday. I'm turning a rather pinnacle age this year and refuse to turn said age in a ho-hum city. I want to be somewhere exciting doing exciting things!

Now, I've been reeeeally good lately and have turned down some very fun adventures and put off the new tattoo all for the sake of having enough money to get my patooty to Italy by September. So far, so good. I might be squeaking by, but I think I'll just make it!

Hopelessly devoted.

hope /hōp/ :A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. The feeling that what is wanted can be had.

Hope is a funny thing. It's not an emotion. It's not tangible. It's nothing you can wrap your arms around. It's not a place. It's not a person. It's a feeling. An inkling. A special hunch that can swarm your heart and fuel your desires. It can be a strong driving force in your life. It can show up from the earliest of ages and stick with you for an eternity. And if you're not careful, it can get left behind, dumped and forsaken without your noticing.

I cried tonight. In a restaurant. Into my empty sushi plate. And it would have been embarrassing if I wasn't so emotionally exhausted. The past two years of my life haven't been a struggle. They've been a constant attempt at walking through a pit of quicksand. In case you've never seen an Indiana Jones movie, the quicksand always wins.

I couldn't tell you the exact moment I let hope slip through my fingers, but I could point to my own personal timeline and identify when my life started to fall apart and my heart and mind both decided to abandon the hope ship. It was right around the time that I had fallen hard in love with someone who woke up one morning and decided he wanted to take back all the sweet and wonderful things he had said the night before and no longer wanted to be the light in my eyes. That was also around the time that I decided to move away from all my friends and everything familiar to go back home. For what I had no idea. But as soon as I did family members started to die off. And by the end of the year I was let go from a job I had had for the past 3 years and was hoping would stay with me through my next move. In less than 12 months, I had gone from absolute bliss and ecstasy to a sad and angry mess.

Fast forward a couple years and you'll find a girl who went from sad, angry, and later bitter, to hopeless and constantly waiting for that illusive rug to be pulled out from under her. I had moved past the anger and bitterness and went straight into disbelief that anything good would ever happen to me. I had come to expect that life was supposed to fall apart. In short, good things only happen in the movies.

Fast forward a little more to the present day and you'll find a girl choking back crocodile sized tears, mid-conversation, in a sushi restaurant, because her friend just hit the nail on the head. He had just defined all her problems with one word: hope. I hadn't lost hope. I had abandoned it. I left it back in the shower of my old apartment where I cried my eyes out over a lover lost. I had left it in those moving boxes that held all my possessions between here and there. I had washed my hands of hope when all those good things that were supposed to happen didn't.

Ah, hindsight with it's perfect vision...

It's a scary move to make, going from hopelessness to belief. Hope reminds me of the feeling I had as a kid standing on Main Street in Disneyland. Everything was magical and all things were possible. As an adult it's terrifying to put yourself in a position of belief, because the let-down can be agonizing. But here I am, at one o'clock in the morning, typing out tonight's events and hoping.