Highway Streak of Light

From “Lord of the Butterflies”:

“You’re going to look at all of your options and choose conviction. Choose to carve your own heart out of the side of a cliff. You highway streak of light falling over and over for your hard life.”

–Your Life by Andrea Gibson

Hello! I hope you had a good week, I certainly feel like I did. In general, I’ve been pretty productive. Coffee shops are empty nowadays, and studying in them (safely of course,) is a vibe that I’ve been loving lately. In general, the feeling of productivity mixed with rainy fall days in a peaceful, stress free environment feels amazing amidst the chaos.

I recently got two books filled with poems by two of my favorite poets. One of which I want to share with you today. Titled “Lord of the Butterflies” is a book written by the incredible Andrea Gibson. They are an incredible wordsmith with passages that pierce my heart every time I listen to or read their work. The quote at the top of this page is one of the most beautiful examples of the art in this book. The pure emotion that is explored and conveyed by everything they say amazes me.

In other news, I have somewhat returned to writing in a much more creative way than just this blog. I began writing something that I am very self conscious about, but everyday get prouder of. For a while now, I’ve thought about the idea of writing a book. If I did, I would title it “Will Screaming Make it Better?” This title comes from a joke that I have with a couple friends, and is not meant to be taken too seriously. I have been known to scream softly in an “ahhhh” kind of way when I am in need of either letting non-worded emotions out, or feeling awkward and in need of shy comic relief. I’m not quite sure which person in my life gave me the idea of the phrase, but I love it nonetheless. I hope one day to be very proud of this small piece of art and be able to share it with you.

Fall is in full swing and it is simply beautiful. As often as I can spare time off I’ve been taking to walking or taking pictures in the beautiful colors. Hannah and I had a cider-mill date recently and got some pretty cool pictures as we traveled along the winding nature paths.

I’ve been feeling really good recently, but I want to go ahead and acknowledge the bad days. It’s really easy to constantly put yourself out there on various social media platforms as this trendy, happy, and perfect person. The reality is this is what society has conditioned us to do, but is not always the truth. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty consistent that we’re told from a pretty young age that we need to be constantly happy. That we need to make that instagram post of our perfect morning coffee, but what we’re not showing is how hard it was to get out of bed that morning but how proud you are that you did. I have never wanted to sugarcoat things on these pages because what happens is real whether society has conditioned us to normalize it or not. It is okay to have a bad day, and I had a couple this week. Spikes in anxiety and days where I didn’t get done what I wanted too were days that didn’t feel great, but they happened. And that’s okay. We’re just highway streaks of light falling over and over for our hard lives.