You're Still You

I really am no good at coming up with names for blogs, never have been but ah, it is what it is. I keep meaning to blog regularly, even made a plan to freewrite each day but it seems like I can never actually stick to the schedule I write out for myself completely and the thing that gets put aside the most is my writing simply because I wish to do a good job and not something half assed.

Life is so busy, its incredible and maddening at the same time.

I love my school, I love my classes, well outside of Italian this semester, and I love my life, where I am right now. I'm sitting on one of the couches in my living room in my apartment. Yup, my apartment. It still feels so strange to think of a place as 'mine' or even 'ours'; my Love has given me so much and the most valuable thing after his love is the fact that I have a home now, something that no one can take away from me as long as we stay here. Its my place, I can be alone or invite people over, I have privacy and company, I am finally not a guest or a burden, not a charge handed off like so much baggage. Its truly an incredible feeling and I actually like taking care of it.

I'm really happy with how I set up the living room, I hum as I clean the kitchen, I smile when I settle into my 'office' space to work on school work.

So life is good, really good for the most part. Oh there are money worries and school stresses and frustrations, namely with that damn Italian class, but its nothing horrible, its pretty 'normal'. Sometimes lately I've worried about having lost myself, about not knowing anymore who I really am, at least I don't have such a defined notion of myself as I use to. Talking to my Aunt P yesterday though, a bit about that, about how much I've grown and changed, I realized that it isn't a bad thing that I can't fit myself into a definition anymore, that it just means that I'm more 'whole' if that makes sense. There are no words to truly describe a person in full, no way to express to their very soul who and what they are, and seeking that I'm doomed to fail. I have changed a lot since high school and I'll keep changing and growing over the next few years, over the rest of my life years and years in the future. And I welcome it.

I realize now that life isn't about an end destination, it isn't about achieving a goal and then stopping. The me in high school didn't. I wanted to go to college to prove I could and actually do something with my life, I wanted to see the world, help others and then hopefully pass away. A neat little to do list but not exactly realistic, life is never that neat, you can't control the world and other people, all you have is yourself.

I guess I viewed life as being only one painting and once I reached a certain point I would just be done. life though is a succession of paintings, each more beautiful and deep and colorful then the next. I look forward to the future now, to the long years that still wait me with all the promise of aging like a good wine, I want to be full and lucious with life, something to tempt the senses and stir memories. I look forward to being 'refined'. Each day, each week, each month and year is just another step forward on the journey that is life and though I don't know where it ends anymore I want to embrace it and let it help me grow, let me learn and live and savor that living.

I'm...looser now. I don't have that neat little checklist of 'to do's', no set career path outside of something in Illustration, no huge goal looming as the end all be all of my life. I have instead a major in Illustration and the amazing growth as an artist to look forward to, I have a wedding to plan and the world to see, I have all the chances and choices I don't even know of yet just waiting there for me. I don't know where I'm going to end up but for once, you know, I'm okay with that. And I do know, no matter how far I go from this apartment where our lives started together one thing from here will remain the same, I'll have my Love, and at the end of the day that's all that matters.

I do sometimes miss that knowing of myself though, knowing that I was this, this and this, and that when I was each thing I was a certain way. Now there isn't really a sectionalized part of myself, I am myself, all the time, I don't slip into each role that I have one at a time. Sometimes I struggle to balance all the differing parts of myself, I mean the biggest parts are the student and the lover. But its hard sometimes to find time to be submissive, to slip into that part of myself to the depth that I want to, or to be simply the writer or any number of other things. But that's life no? Compromise that is.

Still I want to find parts of myself I've neglected and tend to them, just as I want to tend to my art and my writing, I want to make sure that as I grow I don't loose any of those aspects I so cherish and feel have opened my life up in amazing ways.

At the end though...I'm still me, regardless. And Josh Gorban is an amazing singer :)