10.4.24 // The Weight of Experience
This is me...
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I'm moving into a point in my life where I can feel the weight of experience forming.
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It feels like I am no longer holding a magazine of my life, where there are pretty pictures and short stories that capture just glimpses of moments and flash-in-the-pan encounters.
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Instead, I can see that, without my attention or noticing, the magazine transformed from glossy photos and an easy-to-flip-through catalog into a novel with chapters thick with expansive ideas and pages dripping with details that are begging to burst to life in my mind's eye.
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I can see each version of myself coming to life over the years and over the pagesa character arch forming with each passing section of paper and ink.
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Some chapters I like to revisit to bask in the details and sip them in, becoming intoxicated by the bliss that pours from the pages. I leave those chapters drunk on the possibility of life, coated with a finish of hope and a dusting of the hopeless romantic heart that beats each moment to keep me alive.
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Some chapters I like to revisit to remember the moments where I became another version of myself. These pages describe events that pushed my choices and begged me to move forward toward who I would become. It was in those moments when life dared me to grow by any means necessary, through tears and pain, scars on my body and scars on my heart, through renditions of myself, that I now reflectively love but also hate because I wasn't true to myself. I wasn't loving, or kind, or curious. I wasn't me in the external world, influenced so much internally by people, places, and environments I was too weak to stand up against, to see my contrast as beautiful instead of trying to blend in.
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But the ever-forming novel that pours words on to paper daily is a story that is growing, and for the first time in my life, I can see it filling with love and wonder, heartbreak and hard times. The narrative, the plot twists, the characters, the details - I see them, and I relish in the words that wrap me in my truth.
