and put me to sleep.
i'm always in my head. constantly. if you ever ask me what i'm thinking and i say nothing i am lying. it's not always important. it's rarely consequential to anyone other than me. but it's always there. in interpersonal communications they call it the cognitive gap. people can speak less words than they can think. so what we hear and what we say takes up only a small amount of our brain energy. and the rest is free to do whatever it likes. mine swirls around and around constantly. lately it keeps coming back to how at peace i feel. logically i know there are things that should stress me out. i can list them. i don't make enough money to pay my bills sometimes. we need a third roommate. i graduate college in less than a year and a half and there are no plans for afterwards. not even close. not even a notion. but i can't even make that stuff bother me. really the only time i get a little anxious is when i worry that the people i base my life around will disappoint. but people do disappoint. we all do. and a wise person once said that you love who you love and that's all there is. and so i've been doing that. love that is conditional is not love at all. if the people you love are unreliable you accept that because you love them. and God knows that you have your own flaws but hopefully they love you. it is our imperfections that make us whole. and the last year has brought me that lesson a hundred times over. and i learned it the hard way--through tears and shouting and broken hearts. and i wish sometimes that my relationships had not been wounded in this way. hell, i've wished it a lot of the times. i've wished i hadn't said the mean things i said. i've wished i hadn't heard the hurtful words said back. i've wished i had returned phone calls i ignored. i've wished a hundred thousand times that it wasn't my first instict for so long to push people away. yes when i look back i would give anything to change some or all of those events. but it all brought me to where i am today. and when i look at that i know that i am the better for it all. i sound like oprah but i do believe that all the trials of the last year have allowed me to love in a more real, less superficial way.
there's another thing in the last year that made a long-lasting impact on who i am, what i stand for and where i'm going. and it's lame and it sounds absurd but it was my time at Cozzi Cafe. When I left, it broke my heart. Seriously. I never would have guessed that you could love a place so much. Yet, I have more perspective in the months since i've been gone. And my time there brought me many lessons. I loved what I did there. I loved working with people who cared, for people who cared. I loved leading. I loved the oppurtunity to work with something that wasn't fully molded yet. Like being given a piece of clay and permission to make it a vase. But I am young and I am untrained. And in the end it was guesswork and experimentation. And that is an amazing opportunity but it was more than should have been offered to me at the time. I learned so much--about myself, about management, about business, about people--but it was unfair to do that in an environment that really needed someone who already knew all of those things. I feel bad about that sometimes. Like maybe it could have worked if someone else had taken my spot. But in the end, I know that I did the best I could with the knowledge I had. And I am eternally grateful to Mike and Jen for not only the opportunity they provided but also the faith they had in me. I learned a lot while I was there but I've also learned an awful lot since I left. My life is drastically different. I don't stress much anymore. In a year I learned what it takes some people a lifetime to learn. You've got to pick your battles. And they better be wisely chosen because once you've picked it, you owe it to yourself to fight like hell. But most anything can be answered with a shrug of the shoulders and a "it's just..." "It's just coffee..." "It's just dishes..." "It's just money..." If this is reasonable response then it is the best one. So there aren't so many battles to fight. I play more. I sleep less but feel better rested. I've never been very impulsive. And I've always wanted to be. I feel like youth deserves a level of impulsiveness. I don't know why and it may not be related but the last months have been full of decisions that I would have overthought myself out of this time last year. Nothing destructive. Nothing detrimental to my well-being or the well-being of others. Just fabulous, fun things that would be destroyed with too much talk, too many thoughts. I make school too relevant to my life but there's this org comm theory that says that organizations do their best work at the brink of chaos. Right there on the edge between order and chaos, we find what it is we need to thrive. I love that theory. I want to write papers on it. Do case studies. Change its name to include mine. And I feel it applicable lately. I think that if we're doing this youth thing just right its a fine line we walk between utter chaos and rigid order.
One more thing happened last year that will forever affect my outlook and hopefully my actions. You all know what it was. And if you know me, you know it shook me to the core from the instant I found out. And to this day I find it unbelievable. I think about him all the time. And again wishing I'd been kinder and picked my battles more importanly. I still expect to see him around or at least to hear he is around. And yet... Time has always seemed infinite. We are young. Time is plentiful. If we don't do it today, we will certainly do it tommorrow or at the latest the next day. I still do this. All the time. I'm still too scared of what people might say or how I might look if i do something vulnerable. There was never anyone who made himself so vulnerable and who received so much love in return. I wish we could all learn from that. You never look foolish when you share yourself. I can't say that I have thrown away my inhibitions or torn down any walls but I hope to. I would love to wear my heart on my sleeve. If there were nothing else to remember him for (but theres so much) it would be his willgness to give his heart away. And to make it known to the world. I admire it and always will. Love is never regrettable. There is a line from RENT that nicole said once and it will stick with me always... "you always said how lucky we were that we were all friends, but it was us baby, we were the lucky ones"
If you've made it this far you are better person than me. I will probably never read this in its entirety.
Thank you guys for putting up with me through the rough patches. We'll make it worth it.
"I've got these friends.. some that I hardly know.. but we've had some times I wouldn't trade for the world... we chase these days down with talks of the places that we will go..."
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bouncy
