life lately

what i’ve been listening to (on repeat, in full hydranchular fashion):

swaaayyyy. not only do i really enjoy this song, but i love the name of the artist. anna of the north is just too badass. please call me m.j. of the (mid)west.

this song came to me randomly on a day of sad songs. it’s a great song about love and friendship. probably has something to do with romance or relationships or something like that, but i’m ignoring that bullshit. don’t wait… i won’t!

firestone >> i hear you, and i like you.

other things i love right now:

this is really old (like from 2014… vintage!), but one of my bffls sent it to me. i can’t stop looking at it. “even i don’t wake up looking like cindy crawford,” says cindy crawford.

wear the same thing to work every day? don’t mind if i do. my wardrobe is pretty much exclusively black anyways, so wearing the same thing wouldn’t bother me at all.

my dear friend alyssa’s instagram. she just spent a month in india, and i’m obsessed with the pictures. it fills me up so full to have friends that are doing challenging things that only make them want more and more.

love/hate the fact that i just updated to ios 8 and now there is an ios 9. but i’m not hating that i can track my period in the health app. thanks for acknowledging my vagina, apple.

modern parks + recreation. holy moly, i love chicago.

sent from my mom, the queen of facebook picture reposts.

photos from pinterest, instagram, and buzzfeed. thx guys.

great expectations

"for an hour or more, i remained too stunned to think; and it was not until i began to think, that i began fully to know how wrecked i was, and how the ship in which i had sailed was gone to pieces." charles dickens, great expectations

when i was younger, as in, really, just a few years ago, i thought i knew exactly what i wanted. in fact, everyone knew exactly what i wanted because i told them.

i wanted to live in a big city.

i wanted to start my career right after i graduated.

i wanted to start my life, i thought. the only way to do that was to have a “real job,” and be successful.

but now, i don’t think i entirely know what i want.

the 18-year-old version of myself would hate the 22-year-old me because i’m so indecisive and flakey. she would think i’m being lazy because i’m not making decisions. she would hate my flip-flopping tendencies on post-grad plans, my irritation towards people who’ve got it all together, and my decreased use in written planners and sticky notes.

she wouldn’t understand me.

it is so crazy to me to think about how much has changed in my life in four years. not only would 18-year-old me dislike and disagree with who i’ve become and the choices i’ve made, she wouldn’t recognize herself in me.

a barely washed, dishwater blonde hair turning more brunette every day, dr. marten and all-black wearing hooligan. she’d judge the carton of strawberry stems and leaves drying up next to my bed, the scattered bits and pieces of paper on my windowsill, sticking out of four unfinished books and journals. she would HATE that i want to move back to michigan. she wouldn’t be able to understand my single life because she’s never really known what it’s like to be by herself. she’d be jealous of my tattoo, but only because she’s wanted one for so long… she would dislike what it is and what it represents.

but i wonder… would she be disappointed in me? would she understand? would she still love me?

because i still love her.

there is so much emphasis put on learning to love yourself, but no one ever really talks about whether that is who you are now, or who you’ve been in the past. maybe we learn to love ourselves in stages. maybe we learn to love in bits and pieces, one at a time.

and right now, i’m kind of in love with the fact that i don’t have a strong desire to find a “real” job when i graduate… that i can do whatever i want, whatever i find (or whatever finds me) without expectation. i’m in love with my dirty nails and my piles of half-read books. i love the folder in my computer of partially written essays, because all good things take time.

and i know i’ve said this more than one time, more than two times, more than a million times… but despite the sometimes loneliness, i am really in love with being by myself. would i like to be dating someone? my initial reaction is yes, but my very smart second thoughts say, “no.” in fact they say one of those no’s that also sounds like a laugh. like, “ahaha, nooooooooo.”

i might not be who i thought i’d be, or where i thought i’d be at 22, but i’m pretty fucking pleased with myself… despite the fact that it’s after noon and i haven’t brushed my hair, or my teeth, yet.

take me to church... or don't

i remember the first time i didn’t feel good enough. i was seven or eight years old, playing barbies with a neighborhood girl in her dingy basement. i was confused. where was i going? was i going alone? could my parents come? my brother? could we bring my guinea pigs?

“you’re going to hell.”

i didn’t really know what hell was, so i shrugged it off.

this happened to me a few more times during elementary school. whenever the topic of church came up, or the fact that i wasn’t baptized, someone always brought up my inevitable demise after death.

i felt rejected, unloved, and desperate for positive attention from a community that rejected me. so i asked to be baptized.

and i was. my grandparents came. there was cake. i stood in front of our church and, along with a brand new baby, i was sprinkled with the holiest of waters and saved by god.

or so i thought.

because religion is a peculiar thing. the older i grew, the less i believed. i wasn’t interested in going to church every week or reading the bible or being told what to do. i started thinking liberally, freely. my parents were teaching me love and acceptance while the world around me seemed to be cultivating hatred.

president bush was up for reelection in 2004, and i became incredibly political. i was in support of gay rights and a woman’s right to choose; the church and i didn’t agree on very much anymore. i became more aware of an institution that didn’t give my soul or my body the love and support it needed.

as a freshman in high school, i dated a boy who was cheating on jesus with me. his mom told my momma that he and i could be “special friends,” and nothing more. little did she know that i was kissing him in my basement while i forced him to watch crime movies when he really wanted to watch the notebook.

i avoided god and church for a long time. i claimed to be agnostic, but i really didn’t know what i was. i was lost. i was confused. i wanted to be accepted by the people around me.

when i started dating my last boyfriend, i was suddenly surrounded by church again. the more serious our relationship got, the closer (in physical proximity) i got to god and church. the more i thought about marriage and family, the more i wanted to have a relationship with a church.

because i was raised without a forced relationship with a god or church, i felt confused. i didn’t blame my parents for anything, but i felt like i needed someone to blame. when i thought of the family i wanted to raise, i wanted to raise them in a church. i thought that allowing my future kids to at least have the opportunity to believe in something was going to be better than the fact that my parents didn’t tell me to believe anything.

now i see how backwards that was.

because religion, for most people, is something they learn. they’re taught from a young age about god and their church, and they believe it because the people teaching it to them are people they love and trust.

i’ve spent a lot of time in churches this year. more time than i’ve probably ever spent in churches, and that’s mostly because of my trip to europe in january. i paid real life money to be in not just one or two churches, but like, way more churches than i can really remember. i climbed hundreds of stairs to get to the top of st. paul’s cathedral in london and notre dame in paris.

and i felt nothing.

i even talked to alex about how i had such a strong peaceful and spiritual feeling while we climbed around and explored the cliffs of moher, and in all the churches we went to, i felt nothing.

and that’s kind of when i realized that my church is my yoga mat. covered in my sweat and tears and a little bit of my blood, my mat is my spiritual place. my church is my parent’s house, that smells like home and is filled with people i love. my church is my bed and all of the lazy mornings i spend reading and eating my breakfast.

and i think i’m lucky that i get to fill my spiritual dwelling with people that i love, people that challenge me and raise me up in a way that i never felt in a “real” church.