"One Day Can Bend Your Life" - Mitch Albom

Recently, my grandfather passed away, and it gutted me. Like, even though I'm now able to successfully hide it in front of people, a part of me died when he died and I will not be okay for a long time because of it.

I'm not good at talking about my emotions, and in all honesty, I hate that they exist. I legit wish I was a robot so I wouldn't have to deal with the whole lot of them. Happy, sad, anger, hatred, love... They all are incredibly hard for me to express, and in turn it's hard for me to deal with their intensity. A lot of my anxiety stems from how I feel and my inability to express them. Soooooo. The best person in the world is no longer in it, and I still am. I am not ok. But I also know that the world won't stop turning just because I'm sad so I attempted to purge the intense feelings of loss and despair out of my body as fast as humanly possible.

I exercised way too hard, gave myself an asthma attack and felt it in my body for days afterwards. (On purpose, multiple times) I got a couple of "extreme" piercings hoping for some intense pain, and attempted to go dancing right after to trigger the pain some more. (They didn't hurt, and where we went ended up having a drag show NOT dancing that night, we had a blast, but it was not the night I thought I was getting). I accidentally didn't eat for a couple of days, aside from the jerky a friend physically handed me. I looked up, and ultimately decided not to contact some people from my past who while would have distracted me, would have re-opened the kind of wounds I'm trying to keep closed, especially while already grieving.

While I was at the piercer, I had him look at my ears. I've wanted to gauge them for a long time, but it's never seemed like "the right time", and all of the sudden it did. Unfortunately, due to the decisions of Megan Past, my ears aren't gauge-able. Too much scar tissue. I was able to make 2 (out of something like 12) holes in my lobes usable. Ok, not me, the piercer was able to give me 2 usable holes in my lobes and re-open my two cartilage piercings. 8 opened/re-opened holes in 6 days felt really good, and it ended up making me one step closer to fully liking what I see when I look in the mirror. Unexpected bonus!

Which brings me to my thoughts. If I would have known that getting DIY or cheap piercings when I was younger would have prevented me from getting gauges, would I still have done it? Would I have chosen fulfilling the reasons for them existing then, knowingly forfeiting a future want, hoping that future me wouldn't want it, or would I have made a different choice?

When I was a senior in high school I fell in love with the biggest mistake of my life to date, and I was so busy trying to hang onto that toxicity, I didn't register for college. No Pepperdine, even though that was always my ticket back home to Cali. I earned a full scholarship to a local university that I didn't have to apply for, just accept, and because of my stubbornness over it's reputation I turned it down. By the time I had removed my head out of my ass, the only thing available to me was community college, but because I couldn't stand living at home anymore I very quickly had to chose between school and work. Work won.

Even now, I don't know for sure that if I was told what would happen if I didn't apply for the college I dreamt of AND turned down a full ride scholarship to a different university, I don't know that I would make a different choice.

My life is a forever mess, constantly changing in the ways it's messy, but it's my mess and I love it. And yeah, I've made choices that forever close doors for me in the future, a lot of the time, doors are shut that I don't even know about, but that just means even if they look exactly like what I think I want or need, obviously I don't. Or maybe, I'll still want them, even though I know I'll never get them. I'm allowed to want things I can't have, at least while I'm walking by them on my way to the doors I do get to open.

I'm starting to think that no matter how old I get, life never settles. Great job doesn't equal settled. Amazing friends turned family and family that are friends doesn't mean settled. A comfortable home doesn't mean settled. Finding a person who fits into my life like a puzzle piece won't mean settled. All those physical and heart comforts just make it easier to handle the things that shake life up. Settled is a lie. Happy and at peace is the goal. But settled? Never.