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[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

getting through the clutter

I found survival as something new to figure out, and I learned it later in life.  I didn’t really know what toughing things out meant other than being dropped on and off buses taking me across SE Asia at my own will, my version of famine being crackers for breakfast, existentialist reckoning at 12 pm. It wasn’t until I found myself living alone in France, not by choice initially (breakups are a cruel game), that I understood that things had to remain simple or else I was going to lose my marbles. House, food, get from here to there. Enough. I hadn’t ever thought that way before. Before, everything had to be complicated and purposeful. It battered my reality of what I really needed. It reminded me that it is in fact a major privilege to ask: am I okay? No, then what can I GET to be okay?

Everything had been asked that way up until things were all really not okay, probably the most “not seeming okay” they’d ever been. Because I had just turned 26 and needed to have my life figured out, so said I. Until then, every need to fill boiled down to a “temporary okay-ness,” one filled with glasses of great wine and boyfriends and single life backpacking trips that replaced feelings of loneliness and subdued happiness for feeling like life was “on.” But, even in those moments of feeling good that my sad self wanted to feel again, I had a few emotional coping tools but no processes, not even “toughing it out” was going to cut it nor endless meditating. Here was the question I had to answer trying to simplify my unhappiness: what does it mean for my happiness when things are even seeming to “go my way?” It all simmers down to what I felt was a pendulum of dependence. Don’t break out the bongos — this isn’t esoteric or utter pragmatism. It’s an undertaking and it doesn’t look one way or is named one thing - it’s the process of decluttering, is what it is, and everyone can do it.

I’m in the midst of a decluttering now. The clutter starts in the mind and builds and breaks your surroundings: to declutter means to get very real with yourself about what is “enough.” Once I lived out of a backpack, it wasn’t sail home safe, Polyanna. I didn’t immediately want to live in a tent or be on the road for the rest of my life. I didn’t even want to travel blog. In fact, my first few trips left me hungry for more answers, not less. I thought about “what I should do” a lot. I wanted my time off to tell me what I should do with my time on. How did one make a living and have fun living all at once? It felt like I was ill-equipped to deal with the uncertainty of figuring that out. So, I kept saying bye to the clutter of my cafe job, hungry for more, and saying hi to the momentary lightness of leaving: for Colombia. Then, I came back and left for France. I see patterns - I thought, hey I just like to travel. I’ll do the living but not really make a living, because I “had to choose.” I wanted something. Now, I don’t. I just want to keep making mistakes but keep the outside noise at bay, for what I don’t need to be found from the previous messes I’ve made and hypothesized less. I don’t have it all nor have I found what I need other than there will be no place where I have everything I need, other than the ability to say “this is enough right now,” and that’s from not having much, I can begin to feel... without saying “small pleasures” too much throughout the day (although it’s a dignified point).

Society primes us well for wanting more, to be more. Without tooting my own horn, I extend Napolean Dynamite dove hands out in PSA support that yes, it can be truly annoying when someone says how travel has changed them. But I can at least atest that it does its job throwing you for a loop with your set of standards. It cuts you down a peg, shows your needs the door, and says to bring them back in half. So hence, enough is enough in travel - so forget the Caribbean and the concepts of “being whole.” Traveling can’t give it all to you, but it’s living within your means and not sweating the small stuff because you can’t or you’ll pass out drenched in 80 degree entitled cortisol sweat iif you do. After all of this hyperextended learning mess of my twenties, I can begin to feel what was initial, unsettling unrest is now coming to fruition as a transformation to be kind, to be respectful, to accept, to forgive. To live with less judgement (mostly). Driving in my car today, even the “mundane” was no longer mundane for me, although sometimes it is and that’s fine. Every day, I try and remember how no amount of money or title will hand me my health and happiness. That is my job to cultivate within my means. 

I don’t think there’s huge disparity of who you are traveling versus at home, and there’s a huge lesson in that. It has less to do with generating consistent contentment and more of living with “enough,” which can be similar or the same traveling transitioned into “daily” life. I didn’t realize what my enough was until recently, and I’m not sad about a lot of my old views being in a whole other box - it feels really…just nice. Powerful. I have twisted and turned so much I am laying on my back floating finally, liking the view and definitely okay when I gulp down a bunch of pool water soon enough. Despite the dreams of having died lately, where I am talking to my parents about the journals they can have of mine and asking my childhood friends if I have died, enough has nothing to do with what something looks like, even in a dream of transformation that’s a mixture of spiritual awakening and a Virgin Suicides made with an iPhone college project. It’s maybe not even its supposed opposite, what it “feels like.” “Enough” is up for you to decide and it will change. 

That’s the constant. Now, enough.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

What I’ve Found From Riding Trains, by Isabelle Hoonan

Even if countries were connected across oceans by trains, I still wouldn’t take them every day. Even if the gilded splendors of a Moscow mosque or the thin air of Everest were readily available, I would take caution to parcel out this privilege. Perhaps I would hop on once a month to preserve the delicacy of anonymity. Riding a train to a foreign locale is an act of accepting calm before unsettlement. It is an intentional act of leaving, followed by a chaotic thrush of discovery with each new thing you encounter: it is a gift to not waste. Should the opportunity arise to disappear on a train for a while, towards something you do not know, it should still be reserved in rarity so it doesn’t lose its meanings.

Imagine closing your eyes in the shady enclave of the Redwoods and waking up to the smell of creamy espresso in Budapest. Your face is welted by the imprints of your backpack zipper because you took care to sleep on your few belongings. Instead of the steadiness of an airplane ride, sitting on a train is to be a witness of the changing landscapes, of the people coming on and off the platform, the scrum of moving forward and learning how to sit still.

I have found three things I have faith in while riding on trains: love, solitude, and asking questions. They are, in ways, extensions of each other. To love is to embed within the grains of affirmation and failure. The humility and ego that come uninvited with these experiences of loving require asking questions of yourself and another, while also stepping away to remember who you are outside of someone else.

There’s no order to loving and being alone and asking questions: they are all a combustion of reacting to what must be done to be better, to be greater than what we think we are. To survive. They are our mirrors of experience deepened into no-name meaning. Clarity is not a guarantee, because we all are capable of lying, of having former selves answer for us.  But a train pulls us along to see what is to come.

To ask questions is not as intellectual as it may sound. It is to want to feel a situation outside of your life view, to know the stories that happened before the outcomes. It is to strive to not be trite no matter the hardships you’ve pillowed beneath the joys, because questions are not about who you are. To ask questions… is a loving choice of asking to know what you do not know, an act of saying you do not assume, that you will not judge, that you are listening. It is a gesture to surrender to the expanse of all that you may not ever know fully when you speak to someone. These moments of asking, in silence and the soft punctuation of voice, are interims of existing. They consist of an invisible transformation after everything that’s already been done but now voiced. They are a guiding prelude of everything you must do now. Hold onto them, let them go, and let them return.

I found love on a train in India. One morning, I was woken up by the strange strokes of small fingers against my dirty socks and the smell of burning trash when I blasted my eyes open. Three sets of children’s arms were half teetering on the ladder to my upper bunk, giggling as I twisted myself off of my lumpy backpack to face them. They ran away, bumping into old women in magenta and capsicum hued saris. They wove their way towards samosas being sold through the cracks of metal barred windows rusted from the 1950’s. I settled into my book, a pilfered find from a hostel back in Varanassi, Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” My boyfriend slept soundly on the bunk below. The thin plastic mattress creaked as I shifted to stretch a little before we would get off in a few hours to the mayhem of Mumbai.

It would have been 28 hours on the train, our route starting in Varanassi near the ghats and ending in Mumbai’s maze-like metropolis, where cows walked in the roads next to skyscrapers. This was our second full month together, which began in Nepal in October and would end in May in Mumbai after seven months of travel, without a single day spent apart.

When I look back at this relationship, my very first boyfriend, I cannot help but feel that it was more than just my first series of train rides: it was learning how to give trust to uncertainty, because things always seemed to work themselves out after 28 hours. We rode so many trains on that trip that became a stamp of first love, the gift of freedom that gave us mornings huddled together on a rain soaked train winding its way through the jungle of Sri Lanka and the promising endlessness of starched bright desert in Jasailmer. 

Sometimes we were quiet from the night before, when we argued about money or about small infractions, like how I wasn’t okay eating street food (so dumb, just get sick it’s fine, I think now). Sometimes we were so content drinking chai out of small ceramic cups, a rupee each. Sometimes I could feel the burst of my heart against the walls of fear when he would run off the train with not a minute before it left, swinging around the corner into our section with newspaper-wrapped samosas and I would wrap my arms around him with this melting relief.

Those trains led us all around India, all the way to the North of Thailand from Bangkok, where we worked for a month at a holistic rehabilitation center near Chiang Rai. We found our way back to India running onto trains that led us from Kolkata to Agra, to Rajasthan. It pierces me how much of the good and the bad were catalysts of the train, of losing money and stumbling upon conversations of what we wanted in our lives that would last for hours... the exchange of ideas of what we were reading swelling our need to move and find things out for ourselves, together and apart in our own thoughts. The mixture of sitting still while staring at the reel of passing desert into darkness, only to watch it all fall away, brought the next round of chai’s and holding each other’s gaze. It was as if to let the other know we were there without saying anything, that it was okay to be afraid sometimes, to trust, because that too would fall away. Home was far away but becoming wherever we were sleeping that night. I imagine this when I imagine how my traveling life began on trains. I was twenty.

I found solitude on a train from Seattle to Bellingham. Amtrak became my constant companion my first year of college, when each ambling walk to class became myself obsessed with figuring out who I was going to be, and who I was going to be was not where I was in this docile hippie college town. The swarms of joining and breaking social groups in the dorms, where girls would form quick alliances then herd from gym to cafeteria to class, confused me. I had dreamed college would be a slew of coffee dates and discussing pretentiously directed seminars on Camus. People who had lived in Paris would become my friends, and they would inquire about my time living in England as a thirteen-year-old loner who found solace reading in the musty library and asking strangers if I could eat with them. Basically, I expected my life to be like a low-budget indie feature film.

Each weekend became a disappointment of how lame the parties were, although I still wanted to go to them, and classes packed with four-hundred people discussing Murphy’s Law. I would go home to see my parents and unload my existential grief, but these train rides gave me a harsh glare of my entitlement, my craving for direction that I couldn’t create at that moment, a space for me to daydream of what was to come, which involved going to far off places where I would truly feel like an “artist.”

So I would draw and draw, write, think, listening to music and seeing the mountains meeting the Sound in a new way. I remember my first winter break lugging my duffel onto the train and settling at a window seat, the saltiness of the air and my feelings weighing heavy on my pen as I set myself on drawing my way into Juilliard or some New York bound school. I was all about the accolades, the rewards, recognition. 

Doing art made me tired of myself sometimes, and for good reason, because I asked so many questions but didn’t know what else to do with myself. Why couldn’t I just be someone who simply enjoyed things? If I was to accept my peripatetic leanings, I needed to decide what kind of artist I would be, which is probably why I posed like a judgmental-sensitive Kate Moss fascist in all black 24/7, dangling my Baudelaire book and willingness to take a tequila shot at a fake rave because I was so intent on being well-rounded COOL. Ugh.

Maybe I’d be an actress or a street artist or… I don’t know. At that moment, I was really into replaying the start and stop of the night before, which had transpired like a really shitty Boy Meets World revival that I thought was really, really deep. I had tried to kiss a boy I’d already kissed before, swirling in innocent dorm drinking, celebrating the end of finals and the ending legalization of Four Lokos. He was from Colorado, liked watching Planet Earth but had sworn off weed in favor of incense, and was very unattainable because he was in an open relationship. So… complicated, and thus very appealing to figure out. This was even before astrological compatibility was en vogue.

He made me want to do shrooms because apparently you could see the universe in a kaleidoscope and have some Jungian insight about your priorities. He was worldly and had lived in the Utah desert and was set to go to India and wrote Arabic on his notecards with my calligraphy pens when we would study together in the library. But yes, he had rejected my optioning that we could be a thing, because he was focused and that made me angry, because it meant that I had none if I was going after a boy who wouldn’t chase me. So I did what I always did when I fell down, which was to reject the rejector and still chase after them half-heartedly and be sort of apocalyptic about how my art would always be the most consistent and torturous thing to pursue. I filled so many afternoons drained with furiously typing poems that I later hated. I wish I had seen the sweetness of it all then, which now I see as beautiful for trying to make things matter, even if it was all a bit contrived and suburban girl angsty, like a bad 90′s sitcom spinoff doused in nice clothing and bad cocktail choices in a college town.

“I’m okay,” I would think after I would finish the train ride and disembark towards another destination: home, filled with heated coffee cups and roads I knew well enough to sleepwalk drive, even for a temporary time. I was nineteen.

I found asking questions on a train heading from Toulouse to Bordeaux to St. Foy La Grande. I was twenty-five, on the heels of a breakup, and headed to go meditate for a week straight to “get rid of” this self-antagonizing, self-fabling stewing. I wanted to stop screwing myself over. I couldn’t keep dwelling.

It was time to transfer at Bordeaux, a mad dash to get my ticket and run to the next train for St. Foy La Grande, where Buddhist nuns would be awaiting to bring a group of us to Thich Nhat Hahn’s “hamlets.”

I scanned the train times and asked a stern looking attendant where I was supposed to go in halting French, trying to rephrase before she threw her hands up and gave up. “Fuck… okay,” I got mad at myself then realized this was whatever, I’d figure it out. I decided to say c’est la vie and run to the platform I thought was usually the route, with an end stop of Bergerac. I ran through a bunch of peacoats and perfectly lipsticked French faces to the platform with an end stop of Bergerac and found it was my stop: ça roule.

“Is this the train to St. Foy La Grande?” a woman asked me in English. She was carrying a small luggage with her and had a twangy Australian accent, looked about in her sixties, and had sassy frosted pink lipstick and had matched her powder blue luggage to her cashmere sweater. She was also traveling alone and had a beautiful French train employee named Pierre carrying her other bag for her. Her name was Sheryl. I liked her immediately. She had the exact kind of throw caution to the wind but take care of yourself older woman allure that I wanted. We ended up talking the whole train ride to St. Foy La Grande, where I asked her questions and she asked me some and more.

I asked where she was from (New Zealand, my faulty mistake). I asked why she traveled (her husband had died a few years ago and she needed to move). She gave me the salt of the earth older woman advice that I so craved as a wandering but not quite so young but sometimes a beginner mid-twenty-something-year-old.

“I started traveling when I was young, but over the last few years I haven’t settled much until now,” she told me. “No matter how much I moved around after Alan’s death, the grief still followed me. I could be waking up in a villa in Santorini, greeted by the sun and the surf, looking fantastic in a white string bikini with sangria and pool boys surrounding me, and I would sometimes feel close to nothing. I would feel grateful while watching a sunset, but my head would be a haze of sadness. These things follow you, you know. Loss. You just have to learn how to sit still with time and somehow, after going through all of that hell, you find some light without needing to try so hard.”

Now she was having a light affair with her gardener and had the cut the bullshit and go be awesome attitude that was hard-earned with age and experience.

“Honey, as hard as it is, it’s important to learn how to keep it light. I was like you and tried to find the depth in questions.  I wondered how men who didn’t wonder so much about me could be figured out or try and find something that didn’t quite exist in them. Just learn to leave it. Just be an international woman of mystery, and the suitors will come calling, but they’re only the appetizer. The most important journeys, like train rides, are the ones where you ride alone or are accompanied by a friend to cut you up in laughter. Or the ones you stare out the window wondering where you’re meant to be. These journeys are the ones that sweeten the real love, that bring a friendship deeper to yourself or with a girlfriend. They are the ones where you discover yourself most that will give you the type of grace and grit that allow you to say hello and goodbye to places and people that don’t ask anything from you as long as you don’t ask anything from them. These sweeten the deal of life.”

When I headed back from St. Foy La Grande to Bordeaux to Toulouse Matabieu, I had spent a week meditating, especially on Sheryl’s life wisdom. I had thought a lot and not thought so much simultaneously. Who knew breathing could be breathing into something greater. It lightened my soul to feel the depth of being good enough for now again, of being curious, of realizing it wasn’t all about me, all these thoughts and feelings backstories but not the main show.

The main show was being right here, no dress rehearsal needed or discussing too much so as to not infringe upon instinct to act with that grace and grit Sheryl spoke of. I sipped a super fine glass of wine after a week of tea and watched a sheet of bright blue sky and laughed at and with myself, this me sitting at a cafe by the train station while the nuns waved, pretty damn happy with myself. Because being young and free can be a whole life thing if you can laugh a wild laughter in the heart of sadness, not to discredit, but to say “I’m back” even for just a second. I was twenty-six.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

What it looks like to be broken up with abroad: Part II

“People think relationships are supposed to be natural, that when it feels like you don’t want to deal with their side of things that it means things are done,” explained the American pastor from Alabama. He stroked his fluffy Scotsman beard with careful consideration of his next words. “Love is a choice. The way we feel appreciated is different. But we have to wake up and say, I choose you and I want to get to know how you feel love every day. But they have to do the same back.”

I nodded, running through my mind how soon it would be until I could have this conversation with my boyfriend back in France. Rome had embraced me in all of my grasping for a reset. A few days ago, the cheap transportation transfers and running with my backpack through Rome’s seedy central station at midnight - all on my own once again - felt like a thrill that racked my insides with nervous glee. This trip was a gift to myself of independence. A gesture to my need to move instead of taking the plunge into reliance upon someone else. An indication that I hadn’t totally disappeared within the co-dependency of a live-in relationship, one developing and tumulting over language differences and separate views of effort and commitment. There was something about our being together that was glued by a transforming travel lust, where I would replay the mornings we would wake up and walk to the exito and kiss in each new spot because it was new and we were new.

But after months of working doubles and now living together, the day to day was not a growth of the swapped adoration, of when he went to find me when I got lost in Santa Marta getting groceries, or when we would swing out of our separate hammocks to go walk on the beach and he would look and say, “I want to wake up with you everyday.” Now we had the chance to wake up with each other everyday, but the cold living room and where we were to go with what we wanted had become arguments over how often he didn’t say “I love you,” pondering the meaning of who cared more or less by a clearly disparate view on how we wanted to live our lives.

I thought I could adopt his life of going to festivals and riding each day out as “money will come, right now let’s just enjoy.” I was still a traveler in my fumbles with learning French and feeling the waves of excitement and discomfort of meeting his parents (all in French, over a four-course meal), his friends, wondering in my very-American perspective of why he didn’t just find a job and how long I would be able to last without an income, work becoming a practicality and a defining endpoint of how I was to redeem myself after traveling and “taking time off” these last few years.

We were supposed to lay down roots and grow up together. But I was in his city after he had been away traveling for the last three years, and it became innately disjointed how different we were. Mainly, how we looked at each day. I began to think I was wrong in my approach, that I wasn’t adapting fast enough or it would be easier when I became fluent in French. Was I projecting too much? I began to accept that I knew nothing and he knew everything about translating that quintessential traveler “present-ness” into “real life.” But he didn’t want me to teach him anything, so I became the student. I couldn’t tell if it was either transforming or demeaning, or both. From learning how to use the Italian coffeemaker to feeling guilty about speaking English with him while others implored why he didn’t speak French to me, which he would quickly respond by telling me that English was easier for us but that every encounter with his friends I needed to speak French. I learned to operate by putting my thoughts into a box, that things were to come and right now I was to focus on fitting into this new box of living, where the pleasures of cheap great wine served up by a French boyfriend and the enlivening alone-ness of walking the three miles home each weekday was my new life that had no immediate path of “me-ness.” It was like traveling, only with no end-date. The uncertainty of how he perceived our relationship (because he never wanted to talk about it) spurred responses in me that varied from “well, maybe I’ll just move out” to “how else can I try harder?” I got used to not talking and trying to try. The recreation of our physical connection was our safe space, so I relied on that as reason enough for why I was supposed to be here, our cross-cultural relationship both enjambed and devoid of language soothers to make sense, so the physical was becoming the communicator for caring. I thought I was learning to think and “be” in a new way.

But, our conversations more often than not made me feel small; while he fumed about my inability to ride a bike fast enough, or for moving his stuff around, or simply was quiet when I chose to write at home for the weekend instead of join his friends for a festival, it felt simple in what I felt: inadequate. Rome was offering me a reprieve from the fear that cultivated in childhood, or maybe just being a woman, the fear that stoked my primary defense mechanism of doing what I was supposed to, followed by an outpouring of novo amor for finding the real things I felt, the real reasons of everything that was unresolved. Letting it all unravel became my reason to live with it all.

My worries caught the air immediately. When I began to feel so free being able to express myself in English, feel the embrace of friends again from my hostel, and then would look at my phone and not see any texts from him to ask how it all was, it became evident that perhaps my deeper connections lay elsewhere from the relationship. It felt too self-indulgent to coerce any new judgement, so I just began to leave it at the doorstep of any cafe I entered and exited alone.

The deftness of being en route in a taxi, feeling sick from too much drinking the night before, wondering if I had any conviction about anything, felt seeping. The previous day, I walked all day with an Australian music producer who listened to my raptures about my relationship, the ups and downs, and was my sound board when every thought began to surface of the sparks of novelty as we passed the Colosseum and drank sparkling water out of a fountain together. Together. His character was less to wonder about, as he tried to kiss me in a taxi sweeping us back to the hostel, as more of the timing came to play: I was discovering the swift beginning and end of something. I was encountering my intuition, which I promptly shut down even after the failed attempt to kiss me and after a nun held my hand at the train station on my way to Sicily, for no reason other than I looked despondently afraid.

****************************************************************************************************

As he left the room, I remained still, sitting upright, moving only to have a sip of cold tea, wondering what kind of green the drawers were, swimming in a distilled clockwork of my first night in this bedroom until now. The windows crammed the buzz of passing cars into this box of a room. Roommates prepared lunch downstairs.

Breakups are not “supposed to” matter for very long. The first week you’re “supposed to” cry and then progress into no contact. I couldn’t think of anything more disjointed, how things are supposed to be. You’re supposed to remember how they didn’t treat you well, how you’re moving onto better things.

There are very few stories that can break us until you are left sleeping next to someone and feeling alone, even while knowing that you decide how you feel and no one can steal your thunder unless you let them. I used to think having a relationship would bring with it a sense of fullness, of ownership of one’s life; I never had experienced feeling alone even when I was with someone, probably because every relationship I’d had involved some kind of emotional distance. The introspection that came with reasoning that I had few options, because I had moved to be with him and I didn’t understand what stood before me if I moved out. The yelling twisted with making believe together that we were carrying on a feeling of emergence because we had met under circumstances where you navigated foreignness together. Now I was the only foreigner. Even to myself.

When you have moved your life to be with someone else, you walk into their life. You must create your own. It became a puzzle of what was personal and what was cultural when I found my days stretching on without much more besides basic needs met. Sure, it was novelty, the drinking milk from a bowl and walking down the river with a freeway sign that read “Paris, Bordeaux, Albi.” Barcelona was the same drive away as Bellingham from Seattle in heavy traffic. Words became heavy, lesser used, because we didn’t speak the same language.

I learned to become the observer, watching conversation as people exchanged wine and cheese and stories and bike rides to the river. It was quaint. I started to doubt the power of words, because I wasn’t asked to use them very often, and I wasn’t challenged with how I thought.

The days after the breakup, I pretty much just made sure I had a place to sleep and went to class. Before I left, I made the bed as some parting gift, shuffling my suitcases to corner to be picked up whenever I found a more permanent situation, which would be never for two months. There was to be the wedding party, where I went with a desire as an extension of my vulnerability, where I did what you’re not supposed to: have a reunion with your ex and then promptly discover the next day that they still don’t want to be with you, shown in eating breakfast across the circle of friends and waving goodbye as a parting gift that you’re not going to be together.

I spent the next months traveling, where I still felt the waves of grief. Wherever you go, there you are. I went to French class, where grammar only made me day dream more. I spent my 26th birthday at a monastery in St. Foy La Grande, where I felt warmth to be together with other women, strong women who would lay out your laundry for you and speak over tea about how their heart had once been broken too. I wanted to move beyond what I was dealing with, but I leapt at each chance to explain every detail of the relationship, the illusion that once I gave a clean explanation of everything wrong that he did or I did, it would be finished. It feels closer to wrapping itself up now that I am home, but perhaps there is the lesson: we can be happy and still have traces of sadness. It means it meant something. As long as those stories don’t tell us what we are and what we aren’t because another person made us feel a certain way; we are the ones who get to choose how we feel. There is a power in another prompting us to move in a certain way, to open our heart and then feel its distance out of our grasp. I guess this means that they really mattered, even when you’re so angry you wake up both wanting them and never wanting to remember anything about them ever again.

It was hard to say goodbye. While I was away, he had gotten in contact after a month. I didn’t respond, he got angry. I thought of what a good person would do, and sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. I didn’t respond for a while longer. Then I did. I thought I’d never see him again, so I told him I wanted to say goodbye before leaving. He happily wrote of a time to meet.

When we saw each other after a month and a half of not seeing each other, it was at a metro station in Toulouse. I hadn’t seen him since Fall, and now Winter bit at our hands, he had grown a beard. He was one of those people who looked like a different person when he would change his hair and could shave and grow a beard within a month; this chameleon affect, which he would do often, made me wonder if he could’ve been an actor. It was always enticing, even to a taped together bleeding heart like mine who craved calculated impulses. And kind words. And was figuring out how to like myself outside of this odd victim role I kept putting myself into.

Seeing your ex makes you feel like you’re yes, exes, but also that you didn’t notice the way they sat at the bar looking older, that they looked a little withdrawn, that they ordered amber beer and drank fast. “This is Rhye I used to clean the cafe to them,” I said. I don’t think he ever knew what my favorite music was. He didn’t like the question of “what is your favorite.” I didn’t try and ask him again. In fact, I didn’t ask him many questions at all, throughout the four-hours long goodbye that turned into a date and a walk back to his bike instead of the metro to return to my Airbnb. He was the one who asked all of the questions, including the last one: “Do you want to come home?”

It was home. And then when I couldn’t sleep that whole night in the room I’d gotten used to waking up in, I knew it wasn’t home anymore. Neither was he.

There’s a strange revelation when you see them get up to go drive cars for the day, bustling around your old kitchen at 6:30 AM and treating you like a sleepover buddy who needed to catch the bus back to her own place. We arranged to meet later that evening, because saying goodbye after all of that was not saying goodbye to all of that.

When we kissed, his lips felt cold and dry. It felt floaty, rather than immersive in the smell of his just-washed sweatshirt and the bristle of his beard. I couldn’t remember many of the details of when we came back together, other than whenever I would pull away and look bemused and like I didn’t care, he would come closer. I actually didn’t care, or so I thought.

Until we fought that night at the same metro stop, only on the other side of the street. He brought polaroid pictures in his pocket to give to me, keeping the ones of us in Colombia together on the mantel that I think he had merely forgotten existed there. He complained about his 40 hour work week and how boring his life was, heaving in frustration when I wanted to go for a walk and he had to meet his frisbee friends. “Why can’t we say goodbye now? I knew we shouldn’t have gone back together last night.”

“You’re not the only one who gets to make the decisions,” I said back in a voice so stern I really sounded like my mother. Jesus. “Just put yourself in my shoes and understand that I thought I’d be here longer and I came for you, and then everything changed and I have to start all over again, so the least you can do is give me a goodbye longer than waving at the metro stop. Just try and be kind.”

“Oh be kind? Like your version?”

“No, like the universal version which is putting another’s feelings above your onw.”
 “No, that’s your version.”

“No, that’s just being a good person!”

Then we agreed to meet the next day after a really angry awkward half-hug in his stupid parka on a rain drenched bench. He went to go meet our roommate for a long night of drinks after that instead of his frisbee friends while I went home and wrote post it notes on the wall of feelings I couldn’t google that could maybe turn into a character.

The next day, it felt like the end of a long surgery: it was going to be thirty minutes and no more. We walked through crowds of people, and I remembered we hadn’t really been like this before, just walking and talking, since Colombia. He always acted restless if we weren’t with his friends, so anything alone together was always in the room or on a bike ride somewhere. It felt weirdly good, like we were getting to know each other again. Like dating in reverse, only I was leaving back to Seattle in two days and he seemed way more hopeless than I’d ever thought. But I still strangely wanted him in ways.

“I’m kind of anxious about going home,” I said. “And living with my parents again. I didn’t plan on this. I thought I’d be here for a long time.”

“Can’t you just earn money for a few months then move to L.A.?” He said. “And that’s what parents are for.” It was weird to see him responsibly pack his lunch instead of remain laying on the bed until noon when I saw him last. His logic made me feel like I could roll with the punches. But also remember how Americanized I was in my palpably too big for my britches ambition at times, where you can “just become a screenwriter” by packing up your car for L.A. and eating Romijn for three years. In France the socialist government keeps you taken care of but pragmatic about your tall-tale glories that remain locked into your modest colloquation.

We gave each other breakup presents. He handed me a gift wrapped in red, crisply folded paper, I gave him a journal I had drawn on illustrating our story, if anything, to say thank you despite how most mornings I lay still wondering how I had gotten to this place in my life. It felt like a dance in fullness again to draw the circle of our meeting to now, because the in-between is where it all ferments, this back-and-forth everything that flies off into the sky and into the ground.

“I’ll always have love for you, even when I can’t talk to you after we both walk away from each other in a few minutes,” I said to him.

He looked at me, wary and vague tears in his eyes. It felt like losing the keys to trying to find his hurt.

“Okay,” he said back.

Okay.

We walked his bike up towards the path “home,” wrapping ourselves in each other that was halfway between a hug and holding each other close enough. This was it.

And then we left each other. I walked away, towards an awning, where I carefully tore open the gift, the only one that he had ever given me besides the gift of asking me to come be with him. It was a graphic novel. Along each page was a beginning of a young couple in love carving a heart and their initials on a bench. In the middle they had split but individually came to the bench throughout their lives to pay homage to that piece of time they had created together and then left at this bench. By the end, they are old, still coming to this bench. They traced the heart with their wrinkled fingers, softly. With quiet reverence for something they’d made together. Without knowing where the other was in the world other than in that spot, captured in their memory even when they knew that person had outgrown the hand they’d used to hold their lover, to master their feelings with a pocketknife.

Perhaps giving me my freedom back was also his parting gift. To be myself again. What I haven’t quite realized, but am now, is another gift he gave me: in searching and seemingly finding all of the wrong corners to say “that’s me,” you are finding the world in another person’s corner of the universe, where “you” is in your outsiderness. That’s where you find your inside.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

Whatever you are going through or the stories you tell yourself of how you are or how the world is, the answers are right there for you - we just know. You do too. ❤️

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

Tell Me a Story: Part I. What it looks like to be broken up with abroad

“Prochain arrêt, Sept Deniers.” The bus lurched to a halt. Each stop - from Jean D’Arc to Concord to Pont Jimeux - weaved in harsh tandem, like chewing glass on a deadline, towards home. The fear stewed, hiding within my French textbooks, the sleeve of my tattered jean jacket… it was becoming a concrete monument, an armored vehicle prompting decisions to be made. I wanted another month, another year to carve this statue of necessity, not this afternoon.

This fear had to do with my relationship, the one I’d moved to the South of France for. My boyfriend and I had met in February in a tiny beach town called Palomino, nestled in the spicy throes of the Caribbean in Colombia. We enacted some clichés: the French bartender giving the American girl free mojitos. In exchange, I went with him to a fishing village the next day to encounter hammocks and more mojitos and deep talks while he flipped from French to Spanish to English. A multilingual love. I fell into a travel love over Carnivale and FaceTime and more plane tickets purchased. It was a thrill of never getting tired of someone while I sat barefaced at bus stops, hungry and happy. It was the turn of my heart waking up to a stranger and a companion who I never thought I’d meet. I felt lucky, and I think he did, too. It was his last night of his work before three weeks of travel until returning to France when I met him. The slow pouring, the calm, ruminating glances across the bar of admiration on both of our ends… the rhythm of seduction when you’re in a foreign country is not hard to master.

What I didn’t anticipate was the loss that comes around the corner after fireworks explode. After bustling around orders on double shifts in order to move to France. The inherent ache of sadness that pierces when you know you don’t belong, when you’re not being loved. Most of the time, you just know. My trove of iNote diary entries had started from the beginning days of being together after three months apart. The techno festival where I slept alone in the tent, wondering in a jet-lagged, wine-drenched stupor over who he had slept with before I arrived. The anger in his voice over not wanting or being able to explain his feelings in English, the crushing sound of his cell phone ringing while he asked what I would do if we broke up “if things weren’t that good.” The photos of his ex-girlfriend and him holding a baby that lay propped against the heater in our room, opening silent curiosity. The warm bed that he lay on day after day, where I would fall back onto after class, musing about my beautiful French boyfriend, or the bed that I would sit on the end of, crying after he responded “well, you didn’t die” after I got back from a near-fatal car accident in Italy.

But I couldn’t let go. And yet the wall of fear had hit my insides, detonating into a need to do something. In class that Monday, September 11th, I couldn’t sit still without wanting to retreat to the toilet to sit in a corner, half-breathing and wishing I could run away from a pain I couldn’t quite name other than “I don’t know what to do.” That feeling of both escape and wanting to open my arms wide and melt into the earth overcame my sense of time. “Je suis malade,” I mumbled to the professor, grabbing my things and shuffling out of the room in a haste. When you know you’re about to experience an earthquake of change, you feel the magnitude, the shaking rumble of what is to come, before it hits. My ballet flats felt like I was dressing up as a woman, my French bus card a posing of my foreignness. My sense of yearning felt too big for my body to hold.

Sept Deniers: this was my stop. The quiet of the woman clutching her small supper of fresh charcuterie and a thin loaf of bread, the soft smell of talcum powder, made my eyes water. I thought of how I wanted her to hold me.

Then there was the numbness of putting one foot in front of the other, opening the gate, walking through the living room quietly while my roommates listened to techno music in a cloud of rolled cigarette smoke. “Salut,” I feigned a smile. The girls, draped in salvaged crochet and amber perfume, looked up for a second from their tartines to say ça va.

In the bedroom, he was still laying on the bed, checking his phone, his list of carpentry apprenticeships strewn on the ground. I grabbed for a sweatshirt, stripping off my blouse and climbing into bed. I mumbled something like “I don’t feel well,” and he went to go grab me tea, which he quickly set on the nightstand and went downstairs to speak his language. Please come back, I want you to talk to me, I thought. When he finally did return to the room, my chest felt like breaking. When you’ve lived with someone, their daily movements become apart of your internal working; you can anticipate when they are ready to leave, when you both are ready to fall asleep, how hot soup might fill their afternoon with something light. But sometimes, when things aren't right, we ignore, we just deal, or we interrogate in half-breaths what the hell is wrong with the other person. He could sense something. “What’s wrong?” he asked, climbing onto the bed and half-laying on me with his arms spidering around my sides.

“I feel like I’m trying to figure out my life right now. I just feel sad.” I turned towards the pillow to cushion the blow of the next truth. “I feel like I care more about this relationship than you do.”

He looked down at me - then away - getting lost in the cartoon painting of our armoire. His backpack was stuffed with a frisbee and beer, ready to flee with him to the next cycle of friends awaiting him. “I’ve been thinking about it too, and the truth is, is that I don’t want,” he said slowly.

There are things you know are going to happen. They are also things you don’t want to happen. There was no sameness, even between us, after this conversation was going to be over. It is a strange feeling when you realize you never really knew someone who you deeply loved, their true desires closeted away for their own keeping. Yours, too.

“You don’t want what?” I asked.

“I don’t want this relationship,” he said back. “Have you noticed that I spend more time with my friends than with you? I should want to spend more time with my girlfriend, but I don’t want to. I just want to see my friends. I didn’t even miss you while I was away for the weekend. And my friends know me, so they asked if I even loved you. Once I thought about it and I said no, it just became real, and I knew I didn’t love you.” He paused. If the room could’ve exploded with silence, I would’ve let it. Or just exploded with anything, really. 
“So, you don’t want a relationship with me, or with anyone?” I asked.

“With anyone. I just want to spend time with my friends and do my year. You and I are very different. We’re from two different worlds. You question yourself all of the time. I don’t. I just want to live my life and for it to be easygoing,” he said. “I really appreciate you and feel bad because of all of the effort that you’ve made with coming over here and taking French, you’ve tried really hard. I like when you do all of these nice things for me, like make me dinner or remember that I have a frisbee tournament or try and speak French to my friends, but you’re comfortable to me. I want there to be passion and I don't feel love for you.”

I’m not enough. The smack of feeling unlovable.

“You never loved me?” There are some questions you shouldn’t ask again. But sometimes you just have to hear it one more time.

“I thought I did, but I know now that I don’t. I like you, but I’m not in love with you.” A cry clawed its way out and found its food for the moment: I don’t love you. When I became aware of myself crying, like always, I began to stop and have that same urge to just melt into the floorboards, into the earth, carrying the pain but disappearing from this person with all of their hurt and mine separated by a knife of difference. I wanted to cut it up into pieces and keep it with me. I wanted to create a gorge of silence to make him miss my voice or any of these nice things that I was. I didn’t want to be nice. I wanted to be both home and the body he craved, the touch of meaning and the sound of something not quite attainable. I was none of these things to him.

“I’m going to give you some space. I have to go see some people,” he said, having backed away from the bed without even a hug or fingers to clutch onto. There was nothing more to clutch onto, just that beach in Palomino trapped in a Polaroid, the novel of missed calls when we were apart, the marked up visa forms that may not see the light of day once I decided to get out of bed.

When he left, he walked onto the next moment of his life. We were not together. It became clear to me that my mind couldn’t nor didn’t need to explain what was happening; it’s like having seen a light in the distance when you’re on a ship and you finally reach it. The glass is blasted out and you can feel its warmth and its mystery when you reach a cliffside with the lighthouse that you didn’t mean to reach. But you’re here. And you have nothing more to do, than sit on the bluff with the wind slapping your face awake, watering your eyes into a haze, and you get to sit on that cliff just looking at the view for what it is, with no meaning yet other than you’re stranded in this moment with no one else to suggest how to swim. Only in this moment of sitting alone can you decide what you do next; most often, it is simply by dragging yourself up and realize you need to get out of the cold somehow.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

When Time Is Wide Open

When time is wide open, you feel like a blank slate: the world has made its mark, but you are free to do anything you like. You can be anyone. But what society doesn’t tell you is that you already are someone. Someone already guided by previous desires and hurts, and those don’t go away. So how do you make your next steps with these when you want change but something inside of you is telling you won’t get that job, you don’t have enough money to move, you can’t decide?

Time is never wasted. Everyone and everything you have ever encountered have made marks. It’s how you begin to be okay with your changing view of the world that matters. But mostly, it’s how you view yourself and the confidence to be able to go beyond just coping.

We often think in ultimatums, because that’s what we’ve been taught. To not just survive, but go for your dreams.

There is no right way of doing it. It’s more than knowing you’ll be okay; it’s discovering your non-negotiables, and realizing that things will always look different than you imagine them to be. We are not a package deal like we are told to market ourselves. And our worries will eventually look like little ripples in the water that we dropped off into the Grand Canyon of our lives. But it’s very real that they feel like such a weight in the moments we experience them.

We are not, we are, we aren’t. I am discovering that we don’t need a list to describe ourselves or experiences. While reflection is healthy, we will never know how everything connects. There is never a complete “aha!” moment that will dictate exactly where we are supposed to go. “Just go” and “think about it” are two opposing directions that make it hard to make a deicsion, because it is good to measure risk and pride. Ego. It’s not about getting rid of anything, but about seeing the next 24 hours as a beautiful gift. We have gifts. Googling my feelings or other people’s paths who I see as someone I could or want to be only confuse me.

So what do you do? You take a deep breath. Creating practices that ground you, that see you as a beautiful flower to water, will only make you water other people’s flowers.

First, we don’t need much.

Second, we do need some things. Seeing “that job” as enabling us to afford our cheese and wine shared with friends, of providing us with healthcare, making that relocation to Europe in two years plausible without denting your bank… it’s becoming more adult in a way less drab way then we think. Being able to take care of oneself isn’t such a drag, it’s bad ass.

It’s so easy to say “well, I have no choice” because other people seem to be successes by being “practical.” It’s confusing, especially when people who you admire, like your parents, are telling you to do as they know. You don’t have to embrace. But realizing there is solace in realizing you are different, you are a creative, and no one can take what’s in your head and heart. You have more to work with than you know. How do you know this? By talking to people. By realizing how much you’ve changed in the last few years, and that you will continue to change and your life will look different in the same amount of years down the line.

While some people went to Los Angeles or Tel Aviv or Paris with $500 in their pocket, sleeping under the freeway, and others went after quitting their corporate job, it doesn’t mean your story will be the same. Knowing that it’s not the end of your dream by taking a day job, thinking that you don’t want to wake up and realize you could’ve been “free” in New Zealand… these hold us back. Because we have our guiding interests that should be enough to go some place and be willing to switch course. Money is real but it isn’t as inhibiting as we think. When I was traveling, I would sometimes feel like I was happy to be seeing a new town, but feel aimless, that I was meant to be writing all day instead of just seeing things. The gratitude and the worry that mingled from realizing I was here but I’d have to go back and replenish my bank account that never reached past $6,000, because while you can’t put a price on freedom, it is a circuitous venture when you don’t have money to sustain your need to move. That is me. I also reject the idea of signing onto corporate life when I just came back from living with ten people in France, with a boyfriend who is okay eating out of the garbage and deems his life a success by changing the mind of his neighbor to be sustainable versus joining Amnesty International. I want to be all of these people in one. But just choosing one right now is going to set me free: because choosing means that I’m moving forward.

Being twenty-six, I don’t feel like I am the eighteen year old ready to cart coffee for the next five years for execs. But I also realize that being humble and being able to say “yeah, it was hard, but I’d always wanted to try, so I did - I tried” is far more valuable to me than waiting wondering what that experience would’ve been like. I’m realizing that there may be less novelty in what I choose next, but the way going after life looks does change - and taking care of yourself is priority. I’m realizing I can’t keep up the backpacker expendable bank account, but finding community and seeing where I go in the next few years after building a base right now will be all worth it. Realistic and aspirational can create sustainability. Sustainability seems like an illusion to someone who is okay being nomadic, but there comes a time when we all need a rest. The recharge makes us appreciate what we have and what we’ve gained from our losses.

It will be hard. But it will be worth it. It already is. We don’t even have to say “I’ve done all of these things” to validate a sleepy job or living in a place we don’t quite want to be. It is important to be grateful, but striking out on one’s own means to act. Words are just words. Advice is important, but it’s based upon what others have experienced. These are valid. But learning to shoot then aim then fire is how we grow.

Even when we are far away from home and feel alone in our pursuit, we never really are. People are willing to help. Hugging yourself, talking to your soul like a younger sister, saying, “it’s okay babe, you’ve got this, you are defined by the kind of person you are,” will make sure that when you feel lost, you aren’t really. You are wandering, you are searching without a map, but you are finding. One day you may realize that you don’t like living where you are, a place that you thought you’d always wanted to try things out in. But at least you know you’ve tried, just like I tell myself I tried to live in France because I saw a relationship as so worth my heart. It was. And so many things are. Seeing people as chances to be kind, to be helped out and to help you, these moments exist everyday. Money and healthcare and “How am I going to do this” is so hard, I get it. But as long as these basic needs are met in creative ways, you are already winning: because you can always change your course with time, but trying is never failing.

You will know when you must move next. But stay where you are and see each day as an opportunity to express your love for others through your gift to speak, to connect, to write, to be there for others. We are on this planet for only so long, and this immediacy is what travel teaches you. To reach out, to be kind to you, and you will be rewarded by not what the mountain looks like, but how you see the mountain. You see beauty when you are open. And that comes from having had that tall glass of water in the morning to hydrate, from a good night’s sleep, from asking that stranger German guy to come with you on the hike, where you share stories of how you grew up. It’s learning how to willpower while you wander when you feel you don’t have much longterm sight, how to laugh even when time seems so wide open and you don’t know what you’re doing after you see the mountain. But you do know. Because there’s an invisible guide within when you cultivate kindness for yourself and others that is more important than external aspirations. How you see becomes how you act. And seeing yourself as a visitor on this planet with a gift for our earth and other visitors, to revel in the unexpected and the quiet, is more than enough. It is really living.

So block out the white noise of what other people are telling you to do. It’s just how they did. Listen well, but you know yourself when you see the smile that comes up when you say “I’m going here” or “I am here,” the smile you see on another’s when you share your lunch or you say “go home, I’ve got this.” Sometimes you won’t get this smile, sometimes people will leave frantically onto the next to do list item. But you can smile for your day’s work is done because all you can control is that you tried. And that is beautiful beyond measure.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

Goodbye South America, Within a Blink of an Eye...

The house is quiet, I’m sleeping in the guest room now, and I can drink water from the faucet. My backpack sits tidily nearby; I prefer the empty closet now. I wake up alone and scan the room. It’s been a week but I already feel as if I am assimilating too fast back into old patterns, reaching readily for a pen to strike a to-do list, only to feel as if I’m never accomplishing enough with my day. I spend hours attempting to learn French again, fumbling over flashcards of the imperfect and the conditional and wondering where the beginning will match with the ending - trying to be perfect. I think about wanting to be a freelance writer and researching how to make that happen. I research visas, workout, walk my dog, update my CV's, organize finances to try and see how to not be too broke and have it all, the traveling and the quest for some job security doing something with writing or art. Hold on, I stop myself. I don't get anything done. Too many choices are paralyzing. Be chill, do one thing at a time. It seems like a day wasted staring at a computer screen; why does it feel like there's always so much to get done, of needing to further myself? I don’t want to forget travel and the simplicity with which I could move. 

It was only a few weeks ago that each morning I scavenged for instant coffee and met each morning without a plan. Jump out of bed, throw on my torn tomato red sarong, hair halfway up, scurry to pack my bag for the next town down the Caribbean coastline. The aqua sky, the calls to take their taxi. Watching backpackers dance and try and hook up with each other, drenched in mojitos and feeling free. Half-filled hostel dorms. Running to catch flights. Tearing through vines up a Colombian mountain, tripping on rocks with cut up legs to see the sunset, because I wanted to say a prayer for someone I loved. Learning to live the questions.

The sound of my neighbor's lawnmower, my phone buzzing with an email, a CNN news alert. I need to get rid of those. Here, the rhythms could be similar to how relaxed I felt traveling; it's a pace that takes more effort when I'm back where I used to be, but it's always possible.  My coffee maker drips slowly; I stare out the window at the Evergreen trees, to the sound of my dog snoring. It’s not banality; every day hums. But I feel different. It’s remembering to be okay with day dreaming and days where I don’t have to constantly think about making myself… it just happens. It’s how things are supposed to work, I tell myself, but there are already too many should’s. So I choose to remember, to feel that freedom again. What do I remember? So much...

I remember the feeling of cold waterfall on my bare legs, across my sun starched stomach, pillowing as I stroked my arms towards the rocky bottom in a place called Bonda.

I remember listening to RJD2 while rustling up some makeshift pans in the dark, eating rice and tomato sauce for less than a $1, salt patched cheekbones, “que tal” and “hermosa” rolling over my tongue. The in-between spaces; holding hands on sweaty buses blasting with reggaeton, sipping a beer in cherry red plastic chairs, the way it felt to be hugged in a bright yellow kitchen smelling of garlic and frying dough during Carnivale.

I remember one morning waking up in Palomino and the next waking up in a fishing village called Taganga.

I remember asking for my money back when the hostel owner tried to follow me into my room; never pick the first hostel, I learned.  Especially when you're the only one staying there: oh Isabelle... you got it, girl. I learned that being tough means you trust yourself when you stumble so you can do better next time.

I remember the people I met the most: the ways we intersected, feeling like we could move through the space together without needing to say much, even if you leave on a Tuesday for home and I’m not sure when I’ll be leaving.

I remember sitting in airports, deciding not to buy the $5 food because that was a bed for a night. Curling up on the floor, sick from altitude but happy to be twenty-five and free, my body marked by miles of travel and one matching tattoo and my heart marked by a love with everything so deep that I can’t begin to describe who or what, just is.

For the writer, even that explanation is more than enough. Learning to love the quiet again, the going instead of thinking. My last night in Lima, I stayed until close at the modern art museum, drawing and realizing, “Oh, I have a flight to catch.” There was a plot in the no plot that I now romanticize, but being home really isn’t all that different. I am writing; I am doing things; I sit in the sun and think, "wow, this is the life." I think it’s called, if I had to name it to tame it, permission to let your focus pick you, then let the rest go as you count the minimally needed dollars in your pocket for a good meal, and go seek out the best of company - maybe it's someone new, maybe an old friend, maybe it's you doing you. Just keep moving forward. Always keep moving. And stop to smell the roses.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

"What ARE YOU?”

The delivery always comes at a delicate point of the service industry day, when the shuffle of the coffee shop crowd has apexed into a frantic quest for culinary perfection: she needs that not a touch of non-vegan, and in three minutes precisely. He needs a rocks glass for his water - Pellegrino because who drinks still anymore? Why are the chairs so uncomfortable? Could you please fix the lighting and make that old fashioned with less soda water? The restaurant transitions naturally with these requests. And then around the 12:30 p.m. lunch rush hour he wants to ask me: "What are you?" I can anticipate the question just maybe not the wording before it stumbles into his order of a tall-no-foam-nonfat-triple-caramel-peppermint-extra-hot-latte-to-go. The espresso machine grinds the seconds into neatly minced sections of appraisal.  

"Pardon?" I ask. I know what he said, but I just want to hear him repeat his words. He has splayed his arms over the counter to lean forward so he can be heard well. His navy Nike "Just Do It" shirt matches his wife's Michael Kors lego-looking watch strap. Her acrylics tap the counter lightly while she hears the barista pack the wand into her nonfat vanilla latte; she needs to rush to her barre appointment now, although secretly she'd rather be riding the stationary bike reading People because she used to work PR for Star before she married Mr. Moneybags and birthed Caden and Braden and Tallulah.  I wonder what they're doing in such a "bohemian" coffee shop. Mr. Moneybags leans forward even more; I wonder if he got the altoids on his breath from his golf bag in the trunk. "Where are you from?" I did hear right. I'll let the six people behind him experience this with me.

I clear my throat to indicate that I am prepared to polish off his basic bitch question. Despite conversations ranging from prolific (i.e. beating ovarian cancer, traveling solo through the Andes) to disenchantingly dull as old men wink and plunk five cents into the tip jar (it was a huge favor of them, they want you to know), this question of ethnic ambiguity (not like he made up that phrase) was a tried-and-true mic drop. Therapists always speak of feelings having a physical sensation. Well, whenever I see a middle-aged white man with an overpriced visor on that screams "Arnold Palmer" like this inquiring gentleman, a flash of pugnacious sweating and hot flashes ensue. Cups rattle a little. Mr. Clueless keeps staring.

"I'm from here." God this is going to be painful. But I am tired and mildly hungover. If I were to take a selfie it would look hagg AF but maybe in a French girl way cause I only put red lipstick on today. The LL Bean Crew have a lot to handle today but I'm dealing.

"No, I mean where are you from? You look like the locals where my third home is." Oh my fucking god.

"Oh, you mean my ethnicities?" My mom taught me to correct people when I was younger. She also told me that only boring peopled get bored and that if my dad were to ever wear white tube socks with sandals she'd leave him. Go Mom.

"Yeah!" He looks mildly perturbed, as if I were too slow to catch his drift. I want to snatch his stupid Notre Dame class ring and throw it in a blender. He seems to look like he thinks he's important, like he's one of those Dawson Creek actors who shows up in a random Maroon 5 music video to seem relevant again. Omfg. I was trying to juice the entire day but now I'm just hangrier than usual.

I could say a variety of answers. 1) I don't know. 2) Eurasian. 3) Fuck off. "I'm not Hawaiian." Dammit, I'm just prolonging the conversation but sometimes it's fun to kick em' in the teeth a bit while they're running in circles. I know he's probably thinking about some old Asian girlfriend he had. Ew. "I actually had an Asian girlfriend who used to call egg sandwiches 'eggy.' You have that in your breakfast sandwich!"  I hope his wife is satisfied with marrying a complete and total douche-nozzle. I'm not even going to inquire about this previous girlfriend, although it is quite aligned with my mom's experiences in the Safeway parking lot of liberal upper middle class suberbia: "You look like a girl I got in Korea!" This is not generational. This is annoying and weird.

"You sure you're not from here though?! You look Hawaiian! Are you sure?" "I'm half-Asian." I give in. This is excruciating.

"I take photographs and I'm always looking for models."

"Can I see your work?" He produces beagles head shots. And some D-list looking models who look like they just took their senior photos at age 35 and wear GAP to their Mormon event functions.

"Your drinks will be right up." Day in the life, people.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

Tell me a story: Yoga Abroad

It had been a long day since the Argentinian had MIA-ed into the sunset, leaving me groping for serenity that very long Wednesday before yoga teacher training was to begin. "Allo!" The hostel owner who everyone called "Daddy" chimed as I shuffled from my porch to my moped. Damn. I wanted something herbed to counterbalance my lunch of nerves and tempeh and air. Ten more minutes till I was expected to be at the Shala for what would be either a savasana cocktail of celebrity rehab or an om orgasm with taut Nordic goddesses who probably moonlighted as amber-infused Bhagavagita sexologists. I was gonna take my gamble and go find out after shelling out the skrilla G's in a moment of BLANKKKKK upheaval one hungover morning in Bangkok just two weeks prior. Time to smatter my Traggae Surf hostel wall with Giselle Bunchden and "Touch Yourself, Ganesh Offspring" quotes.

I decided to walk and observe everything to get into the practice of being "authentically mindful." It took me 3 times of listening to Yo Gotti's "Act Right" before I reached the tranquil wood sign of "Yoga Searcher, Uluwatu, Bali." There was a happy Buddha emblazoned on the coinage that I had arrived to find myself. Skeptical, a little. Facetious, no… it just dawned on me and probably a million times before that I could be the anti-christ to these types of programs. I'd always simultaneously cringed and fawned over the "yoga gurl" pics insta kept on titillating rotation: yoga gurl stretching into some fantastical bridge position, her bronzed bod entwined with an inspirational quote of having "found inner peace" in Peru. "Yoga gurl" sipping out of a chlorophyll coconut like it was the most delicious double-shot of patron that she'd ever guzzled. "Yoga gurl" beaming at her dreaded washboard abs surfer boyfriend, congratulating her graduation with matching sun and moon tattoos and the coordinates of where they'd once met at a surfer ashram.

Why was I here? Did I want to be yoga gurl? Textbook guilty. It was time to reinvent after spending far too much time withdrawn into a shell of "the post-grad life." I could've just bought a $30 insurance covered therapy session a few times a week with a frumpily dressed yet moderately compassionate shrink but nooooo, no no no... I had to go to BALI to talk about problems and laugh with nonchalance when I realized that my hair salty and my toes so tanned meant the world was so fine now, so fine.  I could envision my previous selves clustering together to meet about this cosmic life transition, sharing kombucha while wondering where the wine and whiskey was hidden, rumpling a NYTimes paper to a Jay Z banger, reflecting then brushing off the meanderings with "oh, please, let's just say fuck it and do it. It'll be a great story." Indeed. I wandered up to the Shala, the grass seeming to emanate inner peace itself as it swayed by the infinity pool, inviting the gorgeous participants to "let that shit go." Beautiful women in flowing bohemian glory wandered up the steps, not breaking a sweat in the 90 degree sun, their smiles like sumptuous macca whirling in a sea of boison berries. "Welcome," one of our instructors, Amy, greeted us. I loved her immediately. Her hair was a fiery crown of auburn and she had a septum and her voice was as soothing as dark chocolate dashed in Jameson; when she said "gra" in her Irish lilt I wondered why Hozier hadn't married her already.

We all settled into our crimson pillows and were told to interview a partner so we could learn, embrace, introduce, get to know each other. My partner, Rebecca, was a holistic wunderkind platonic supermodel with a dash of sass who I assumed could do the splits with the conviction of the Dalai Lama's blessing. When it came time to go around the circle, she read my answers as I challenged myself to unravel from a painful expression of half-lotus that I could definitely not do: "Isabelle loves the color black, Bobby Shmurda club bangerz, painting, reading. She is currently traveling on her own for three months and has no expectations of what her experience will be here. She just wants to learn how to breathe and connect with parts of herself that she feels like she has lost." Goddamn, I wanted to cry for myself. Thank god everyone going around the circle wasn't set on this teacher track, they  just wanted some expensive therapy with prayer beads and Shiva and all that. There would undoubtedly be the Eat Pray Lover who had found her moksha in India and in her rose-smelling coitus, but om mani padmi om to her.

I had always loved yoga, but like with everything else, I tended to conceptualize the whole experience into a tangent web of intellectualized thoughts and associations. Or inappropriate metaphors. I loved the feeling of the actual exercise, but all of this head business made it so that it was an experience outside of me usually; the spirituality had not yet caught me, although that was why I was precisely in Bali at the golden temple shala at that very moment. I wanted a jolt and so I was going to throw caution to the wind with a degree of control based on the internet's blessing of great reviews of women who were trying to do the same thing as me at yoga retreats and teacher trainings abroad. I'd felt like I'd been unraveling for a bit already, so decluttering some of the mess seemed beyond essential and spiritual tourism was what I thought would be quite the graceful quick fix.

The next few weeks turned into an amalgamation of self-discovery and trying to do certain asana positions and also some penetrating flares of frustration but also laughter at the absurdity of some "unfoldings." Every morning started at 5:30 am in the shala, which meant rolling out of bed and spraying myself with delicious DEET at 5:10 AM before sauntering out the door to walk with my neighborhood bombshells, Greta (from Wisconsin) and Becks (from Norway). Thankfully, Becks and I would sprint back to "Daddy" come 7:30 AM to guzzle buttloads of delish Balinese coffee while commiserating about how our hips couldn't open and yet how we loved Dipa's lectures on the feminine and the masculine merged into perception within the concept of the 8 folds of yoga. After this ritual I would usually blare Schoolboy Q and practice twrking (always come prepared) for a solid 40 minutes before going back to the shala for some alignment where I prayed that we would have partner massage sessions that would make my celibate self feel some firing synapses.

I found some soul sistahs in my atypical American peers. Erin and I found each other at the next door warung when she explained how she wanted some body bounce and less namestes. She became #1 woe. She is the baddest bitch of them all, especially when we listened to E-40 by the pool and she claimed in-person basis with the bay's pride and glory. And she worked at Twitter and claimed a title in an Aussie wet t-shirt contest and has traveled the whole world and is an acclaimed blogger. And would do neck shots of tequila with me. We became each other's co-dependent trap queens at the local Single Fin club. Thank god I wasn't in love while I was incorporating into this yogini program. Instead I meditated on everything I was looking for and why I was alone and why I was so ecstatic to be single (until 10 pm). It was like a study abroad for starving yourself on green juice and breathing and all I had to do was make decisions for me. My agenda was to get everything out of my system, although that comes at a cost: because then you actually discover yourself. And that can be... hard. But necessary. I realized I was a whole person and so was everyone else no matter what point in life they were at. Basically, yoga teacher training is like a caftan clad sorority who hold a cave open for worshipping Jack Johnson and period moon goddess parties. The worst part was feeling simultaneously annoyed and a little crestfallen that I couldn't cry post-meditation while others sobbed about varying levels of tragedy and spontaneous emotion. It was as if a little Eagle perched on my soul and clawed at any inkling of a tear. I cried when the nutritionist talked about how her old friends who drank cheap wine and smoked cigs didn't accept her newfound love affair with kale and B12 shots. Figures.

On a lighter note, I would check my Tinder abroad after an arduous day of leg flexing. Here is what I found that led me to keep doing downward dog to soul search and not find men.

Not too savory. But I would often wash away the unsightlyness of it all with a good ol' gin and tonic with the American girls, especially after getting our yoga certificates in our crocheted crop tops. One interesting note: Americans cannot accept awards without looking like complete douche bags. We all joked about it afterwards that the four of us couldn't make heartfelt speeches like the fellow Europeans did. We just collect those trophies like candies, stating after the acceptance, "yeah, thanks guys, love you" as a token of our appreciation. Point of relation, apparently.

The whole yoga experience has made wonder what acceptance is other than just where you are right now. It's also made me curious as to how it is apart of the woman I hope to be or already am. I mostly feel humbled and grateful for the women I got to know for a solid month straight x 1000 hypothetical days of deep talks. And for the times that I wondered about who I was; well, that will continue, and so will the sideways splits of discovering bad-assness that yoga training taps you into. I was gonna write a blog on travel tips and then I ended up writing a blog on inappropriate metaphors. Because that's just me. 

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

... And in return we find a new love called courage already existing within the palm of our hand.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

Sometimes we need to place a broken heart in a tiny box called strength within us...

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

Reportage: Why Cleansing is Totes Necessary // A Comedy // Bougie AF

So, this weekend I felt like being a mixture of regimented and “mindful” and I felt like a caricature of privilege. Despite the fact that I live with ten people and am unemployed, I am not impoverished. I have grown up with the privilege of Costco and homegrown radishes and Portuguese soap dishes. I’ve always felt a little bad (but not really) about my inclination towards the more nicely packaged/ more expensive items everywhere, although I usually write out budget lists that are realistically sketched out to include a $13 budget in entertainment. And intend on reading THICH NHAT HAHN and then quickly loop back to Wikipedia-ing and trolling celebrity gossip.

So while I was googling “how to really cleanse/simplify your life” yesterday, I had to have a moment of reprieve from my privileged ways. Why are we so obsessed with this word (”we” as in me and millions of lifestyle blogs) and why are there usually only the options of zen and moneybags reloaded into formulas for us to refer to? Just for humor’s sake, I created a list of stereotypes of my search results. There’s no answer on how to cleanse other than to purge what’s not needed, which is subjective-ish. 

Cleansing is perhaps just saying “no” a lot of the time... Just doing the minimum of what is necessary and picking two things that are important to you for each day. Because drinking miso soup and eating celery and drum circle-ing some subpar world music to reactivate your sexual organs are not the only ways to get rid of anything keeping ya down. 

-- CLEANSING: A MANUAL OF WHO NEEDS A CLEANSE--

“Cleansing” : The Rich Bitch Earth Mother

She carries her African woven basket full of farmers market carrots everywhere, because she loves Farm to Table! It helps her imagine the simpler times of vacationing in the South of France when she smells the freshly cut lavender on the West Elm birchwood counter engraved with affirmations to keep “elevated” as she breaks bread/macca. 

She beams with gratitude as she meets each person EVERY SINGLE DAY IN HER BUSY LIFE with a gaze as “sensually earthy” as amber candelabras. Of course, she made those last weekend at her glassblowing class - after her 5 AM ashtanga practice - because her next thing will be pottery and selling spirulina goji berry energy fragrance to Gwyneth at Goop.

Her Woodstock turned financier husband doesn’t pay attention to her even when she suggests tantric weekend getaways in Oregon wine country for a “cleanse” from the modern world. He always sighs at her after smoking some high-grade vape Sativa and buys her another turquoise ring from the Iroquois she “volunteers” her time for because she’s always been certain that she is Native American… or at least 1/16 Sacagawea.

She has made it her life path to realize her full potential as a Capricorn Sun / Aries Rising in the sweat lodges she invites herself to. She finagled her way into these sacred ceremonies by what she believes to be a “calling” but more accurately occurred after procuring a bankrolled friendship with a local Native American artist. She knew they were kindred spirits after buying his sacred geometry blankets at her best friend’s boutique “Gather.” A new one called “Savor” is going to sell her wrap dresses that she buys from her Guetemalan Shaman, who always forgets that she doesn’t drink regular milk only ALMOND MILK and no gluten when they trip together on $500 ayahuasca that keeps true to her frugal roots of growing up in Marin County. She just loves the “spirit” of Central American people because it makes her feel like she is in the Peace Corps when they smile back at her and offer her the opportunity to pose in photos next to a “saddening” market stand.

All of the Instagram photos of posing in collectivos with poor people will be framed at the cafe where she namaste-scolds the barista everyday for her stupidity in not knowing her clear distaste for regular hummus (acidic!). It’s always only going to be beet hummus until edamame hummus gets on the menu for godssakes. Here she always meets with her caftan-clad yoga friends who all used to be dancers and now have rich husbands who built them modern Adobe lairs to be bored in but pretend like blackberry sage tea gets them high from well being.

She feels forlorn that there is something discontenting about the “minimalism” she has so ambitiously set out to create/dump shitloads of money into, so in the only way she knows how, she will book an Iyasca retreat in Peru. Maybe poor Peruvian people can teach her the meaning of life so she can write a memoir about how life changing it all was. Holding hands with the street children… and never returning again because it makes her too sad, but the lessons of the third world will be tattooed literally and figuratively in a Quechua phrase for life on her wrist so she can talk about it to the young hot river guide men in Telluride…

“Cleansing” : The Twenty-Something Project

She has had way too much casual sex for her pressing emotional need to find someone who loves tequila and rock climbing and contemporary fiction just as much as she does. She drinks way too much tequila five days a week as well as wine during the day because she feels like she can’t access who she really is (that’s what a partner would help her discover in his egocentric artistic ways of being).  She spends eight hours on the computer writing shit that doesn’t matter to her (like emails) and trolling pointless social media sites that make her wonder if models really are people. This is usually the apex of her day, when she recounts how she is in charge of her own happiness but jesus how many genetically modified Victoria’s Secret models are there out there? These girls are now chronicled to be “anti-social-media-bullying” and are just “regular girls,” which she intellectually realizes. But she thinks and researches for a long time how they can be just so: how can they get someone to take their photo at just the right moment when they are writhing around in the water so that you can see that they are so in tune with and gently being kissed by their sexy actor boyfriend (bio in link for his new film with Harrison Ford!)? This is happening while being blessed by the Tahitian palm tree shading themselves, because they’re responsible so they use La Roche Posay SPF and feel #grateful that they are very hot people and have so many loyal followers.

She decides that becoming a massage therapist will likely zen her out all the time and make her like wheatgrass and never drink again and only date “spiritual” men with man buns. Maybe being a masseuse will train her to refuse being around “negative vibes” and only will be in the same room as people who make her feel “full.” And being a masseuse will likely get her laid because she’ll be a healer. So like the google-generation, she finds a massage training in Tulum. But it’s $5,000 over-budget. Instead, she thinks she will just clean her room and eat a mango from the bodega around the corner because it’s only $1. And only have 3 apps instead of 13.

“Cleansing” : The I-Came-of-Age-In-The-Rob-Lowe-Coked-Out-Power-Dressing-Glamor-of-The-1980’s-Workaholic 

EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART. She works so much that she has no life. She hates her pantsuits but started working in the age of Anita Hill and thought she had to break the glass ceiling more because her mom would quote Betty Friedan and preach to not be “ungrateful” to the women like Jane Fonda who paved the way (and the song “9-5,” too). She used to dream about working in transportation and logistics just so she could scan her government card everyday.

Now she hates the Boys Club. She even hates most of the women, who are such mechanical bores and all majored in “Political Science” like smart girls do at Dartmouth. They’re the sociopathic philanthropists who only “endorse” International causes that pay people to publicize the plight of poor people because it looks good in photos and they don’t actually want to help poor people. Unless you’re George and Amal Clooney, you can just show yourself the door.

So guess what? She QUITS HER JOB and decides that something must change... and also that she absolutely loathes Elizabeth Gilbert. This means that she doesn’t want to be BORED hanging out doing yoga in some fucking yurt pagoda thing and she doesn’t want to get FAT in Italy with some boy toy whose worshipping would be as aging feeling as a lifestyle blog… and she doesn’t want to SHUT THE FUCK UP in India in some ashram with annoying as fuck Californians who think using crystalized deoderant is as repenting as when they culturally appropriated Ganesh on their saggy backs.

So what does she want to “cleanse?” Anything committing or societally-fulfilling for women her age (like the constant suggestion of growing a damn garden to be happy…). The solution is to do whatever she damn well pleases from the comforts of her current home and maybe tell people what to do from her computer every once in a while “freelancing” and occasionally go on a few dates and walking out when they’re just blah blah blah. 

Perhaps trying to be “budget-y” but realizing she earned her accolades thirty years ago, so only voting with her dollar when she feels like reusing the same dishtowel or using up everything in the fridge. She learned long ago that you’re not better than others just because you “know how to be poor and sustainable” by eating pumpkins from the garbage … and living with a commune of people you kind of hate for judging you about not knowing the merits of free speech feminism and cleaning with vinegar absolutely everywhere (...everywhere).

She will damn well do as she pleases in purchasing a sugaring appointment or buying a $50 solo dinner. Or online shopping at FreePeople if she feels like she’s lagging a bit on her “cleanse” and wants to look a little like she had a love affair in Barcelona and went cray at the flea markets that apparently only sell pillow case dresses that are so bright and flouncy you have to dance in the streets when you wear them and look like you’re having an enlightening experience even when you drink “fresh mint water.”

“Cleansing”: The Legit Monk Woman

She GOT RID OF EVERYTHING to be noble to a million sutras she can’t quite name but she tries to, usually when she’s drinking a single cup of tea for four hours. She went to Ladakh in 1987 and comes back to Los Angeles in 2017 named Nag Champa and gets a job teaching at some liberal theology college in Orange County where Steven Spielbergh’s kids occasionally come to class. At least they link the school website in their online interviews with Vogue all the time. They are using the Tibetan sound bowls to create a new experimental electronic album that can maybe buy their way into Coachella and they may have her be their life coach while on tour to “combat the stressful perils of the industry.” 

She writes a few blog posts for Depak who is always trynna hit on her. She goes to Wanderlust and blesses the dreadlocked crowd with a hybrid Buddhist-Rastafarian-Katy Perry lyric blessing, throwing Whole Foods rosewater on their toned bodies that they got growing up skiing in Aspen. All of them say they want to be mentored by her in between their barista/yoga teaching/juice cleansing lifestyles, maybe when they’re done setting up their kombucha bar they can swing by and have like a $6,000 certifying sesh that has all inclusive vegan food? Or they can barter with nuts and berries that they brought back from their trip to INDIA.

Yes, she must capitalize on this moment of “wellness.” You can find her speaking and retreat information on LinkedIn that she’s still waiting to customize in a more boisonberry color for calming effects…

“Cleansing”: The-Doesn’t-Want-To-Give-A-Shit-But-Still-Kind-of-Does Woman

She needs to get her finances in order a bit and is somehow always “busy” so she gets rid of what’s not needed by saying: Yes, she needs her organic food. No, she doesn’t need her Argan oil face wash. Yes, she needs a drink at somewhere other than a dive bar every other Friday. No, she doesn’t need to go to Brazilian dance yoga with Shanti for $40 every day. Yes, she needs to go see a concert every once in a while. No, she doesn’t need five paid-for “music experience” apps that “customize” user experience depending on their ever-fluctuating mood and will bring you to “up and coming artists.” Because honestly, these musicians sound like they took a Xanax and hipsters just go to their shows because they’re insecure that they’re being called “hipsters” and hate “categorization of gender norms” but totally need reassurance that they’re doing life right by the Anthropologie curtain-esque crop tops and leg tattoos they appear bored in everywhere. So every grainy film Insta shot is in fact very intentional but they won’t admit it because they will always be pale-faced underdogs just like these up and coming artists who have long hair and little annoying vegan kids with no manners who have ginger hair and are gonna grow up to be soft-core racists because they intentionally want to have black friends (only with septum piercings and a denim jacket) so they can show how liberal they are because their parents were once underpaid touring musicians and they know what struggle is because they tried acid when they were 14 and they saw how we are all “the same.”  

Yes, she needs stupid email to make a living. No, she doesn’t need Snapchat because so much meh and overwhelming tapping all the time.

…DONE. Now she’s livin’.

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

what I've learned

I don’t want to explain much because I think the photo speaks volumes about how much of a sexy icebreaker a neck brace can be when you’re trying to talk in choppy Italian. This photo (okay, a selfie, TBH) was taken in the Milan airport on July 23, 2017, two days after a horrific car accident one of my best friends and her family and I were in. Despite receiving beautiful messages from my dear friends and family, check-ins that mean the world to me, that help me heal, it’s been a hideout of stagnant headspace, of not moving much or thinking much about what really happened; “I’m okay, I’ll respond later, I love you” or no response has been my mode. I didn’t even tell anyone other than a few friends and my family. This I regret. Perhaps to keep going? After all, nothing permanent happened to me physically. This experience has made me realize that it doesn’t matter if your experience is worse or less so to others’; life is not a comparison. I realize it is the greatest disservice to dismiss. There is a significance to those tiny waves of “yes, you feel something, I know you do, stay with it.” That moving forth fast and going back to normal and keeping it all light is not a permanent must-do... that the opposite of that is not always sadness. That reflection can be triggered by the voiced concern of friends; for them to care more about me being okay than me asking that question to myself, I don’t know how to reconcile that right now. But I can remember so at least there’s an imprint of meaning for the right now. 

 It was surreal watching another car come slamming into ours and wondering who was alive and who wasn’t in that initial shock of the minute after it all happened. Thank god we all were. Bruised and whip-lashed with some fractured bones, but how lucky we were to make it out. I remember that vividly; coming to and hearing the moan of pain and then realizing I was already out of the car, having unbuckled and slammed the car door open even before I could see what had happened. The car engulfed in flames just as we were staggering away and I looked at how close we were to flipping off the guardrails. Everything hurt. It’s a strange thought to know that you could’ve died, or that what happened could’ve changed your life permanently. 

I think it does change your life permanently when you realize how your basic freedoms can be gone in a minute. It’s no reason to stay inside yourself and never reach out. Doing this would destroy the beauties of free will, which is to move when we feel compelled or inspired... to discover new spaces, whether physical or in consciousness, that we previously did not know existed. What we do know is what we have and to appreciate all those who we love or who we have loved... it’s so simple. We are complex, but that small action, however you feel natural to express it, is a reminder to ourselves that we are living with our hearts outside of our bodies and how important it is to show that we care.

Our bodies are so resilient; so are our minds, they are the same. So when one is affected, so is the other. It struck me that it’s really not that hard to find what is deeply, impenetrably important to myself when I was laying on the hospital bed, separated for a short time away from one of my best friends and her family. Placing both arms to my sides as people passed by in a hurry to be seen, the metal bed post felt cool against my skin. That simple recognition that I was alive, to feel the cold and the buzz of hospital lights. I didn’t tell myself to be strong; why do we do that? We are. 

For someone who loves words so much, I trusted each impulse. And that’s not always crying. Although... seeing a text from my mom asking if I’d had a good cry a few days later caught me off guard. After dropping the groceries quickly on the table, I stood in the living room for a good minute in a tired haze, just staring out the window like you’d imagine a sad girl would. My boyfriend looking at me wondering what was wrong but me responding “I’m okay, I just need to sleep...” He left the room to go make dinner for friends about to arrive. I felt each step heavily as I walked upstairs to the bedroom. The dark woods surrounding rustled the old bed sheets alive with fresh air. Slowly, careful not to move too fast, I took off my sundress, my gold compass necklace, my underwear... until I was naked, gently lowering myself onto the bed, entwining each leg with a section of dust-covered blanket. I moved my fingers around, my toes, pressing my face into the pillow to make myself go away. 

I woke up to the echoes of their voices playing a card game, the warmth of “vacation” found in fresh tomatoes on the kitchen counter, their family of friends sitting down to dinner while I laid down unable to sleep but unable to think...  so I looked at the wall away from the window, feeling that quiver before you break, crawling into a tiny ball and finally letting it all go into a torrent of deep crying that was a release of everything I’d kept quiet from myself. I wanted my family. My real friends. It’s amazing to remember how these moments come to be and how so much of it happens within your own mind.

When I called my boyfriend from the hospital waiting room - and he was the first person I called - he was at a festival and I could hear the scratch of microphone checks and people singing in the background. He was surprised to hear where I was, asked if there was anything he could do. I wish you were here with me, I told him. He told me to be strong; I didn’t quite understand. I just wanted him to offer me words that could soothe.That I could hold onto for the night just like the picture of us I looked at, the messages he sent me while we were apart saying “I love you,” pieces of our relationship that made me smile on my way to Rome a few nights earlier, alone and nervous-excited on my train from Naples. Why could he not give that to me? Then: wait, what can I do? 

That was a realization; realizing your partner is not the person to construct your sense of self, to make you feel happy and wanted and valued every minute. To feel loved was something I thought a lot about in the hospital; how we show it, how we give it, how we accept it, how we learn from it, how we stray from it. I think because I’ve spent so much time with this new relationship these last few months, I came to expect certain responses and ways of feeling from our interactions, only to be disappointed when they didn’t appear. To feel understood exactly the way that I would. But we are all different. And to let people - anyone, but a boyfriend or girlfriend in particular - have their own voice, not trying to change them, but stepping aside in a new direction to say “I choose you, but I need this,” I am realizing about partnership - where the most committed part is in taking care of yourself to see that other person clearly. 

To see their gifts. To use your own in whichever way makes you feel independent and proud of yourself for trying even if there is no "thing” right in front of you from your efforts. That was the gift of that moment laying on the hospital bed: the gift of forgiveness that we are all trying, that we all feel unskilled at times, that we all wonder what could be for us, for others. But mostly, that we are not alone. Because if you look closely, calming the little voice that says you need something you’re not able to get, remember that it is in the nuances of a hand held in reassurance, a passing nod, a question of “how are you?” that is the gift of validation. You matter. 

The responsibility of “doing something great” still weighs on me, though, after seeing that life can be short. It is in the “now” walking home from French class everyday, not just reserved for hospital waiting rooms, that can stop me in my tracks at how amazingly hard life can be at times. But how it is not a problem, it is a challenge, very much worth taking in and doing something about. And that so often begins with the relationships we choose to keep. However near or far love can feel at times, it’s there, it just doesn’t always look the same each time around. There can be more questions than answers at times. How to let people in, especially a partner... when to let them fix something and when you can help them... when you need to be on your own and when to let them be... how to become the person you want to be on your own and how to become together... life is truly a dance when you let someone become apart of you. To keep something for you is something I’m realizing is a pulse that I’ve gathered from this accident; that makes it no accident. It makes me remember how important it is to give my heart but also to keep bits tucked away to soothe myself on rainy days with the resilience I know which to be true. 

While I was being x-rayed, I thought, “is there something else out there right now?” Not God. But I think I was searching for something beyond words within myself. When I felt the days eclipse from being truly held and loved by Amelia and Gili in the hospital waiting room to riding in a bus alone to Catania to catch a flight back to France the next day, I looked outside to see what was real anymore. 

Everything. 

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

when u feel fine AF (at Toulouse, France)

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

when u think about how ur life has changed #evolutionary #revolutionary #growthmindset #proactivelygettingturnt #proactivelygoingtobedat10pm #acceptance #love (at Toulouse, France)

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

sometimes good wine makes me miss walking the aisles of target #expatlife #joiedevivre (at Toulouse, France)

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

update

June 28

How close to perfect was today?

As soon as I sat down in 22A, I just listened. No music, staring at people as they moved with their own thoughts.

My baggage was lost, I just made my flights, I spoke to a French girl while kneading my necklace strand in my pocket. I sat down in the evening cold on a cinderblock outside of the airport. And there he was, and we were hugging for a lot longer than we ever have, and I realized this was a new part of my life, and I welcomed it. So it was perfect.

June 29

When did you last sing out loud?

There’s always a chance that it was by myself, cleaning the cafe one last time (it has been the last time for the last two years), singing to M.I.A. when I open the doors, “Work From Home” when I close the doors — freedom.

June 30

What was the last gathering you attended?

A trance/techno music festival in a field three hours outside of Toulouse. I wore the same dress for three days straight because I had no bags and watched youthful Frenchies bond over wine and cheese and dance to techno in a way that middle school grinding cannot handle. It’s a mixture of a jump and a body electrocution that looks really cool all at once.

July 1st

Did anything make you sad today?

There’s that feeling that you have everything you’ll ever need at 5 AM…. and then there’s the switch of doom when you wake up absolutely wrecked at 8 AM the next morning, sweaty and sorry you ever stayed up that late because now everything is the biggest deal ever. So a lot of things made me feel not sad sad, just displaced within myself. Waking up to a new boyfriend should’ve made me happy, but maybe “should” and happy shouldn’t mix together: I just felt sad. So I went for a walk and cried my eyes out. And cried some more when I found my lost jean jacket… delayed tears. And then cried some more with that hollowed out dry feeling, like you’re observing yourself cry.

July 2nd

Share a secret thought…

My first crush ever was JTT (Jonathan Taylor Thomas, I still get goosebumps) which isn’t that unusual if you once bought fake hair scrunchies from Clair’s and ate Ritz peanut butter crackers as an after school snack while playing Bop-It. But I also used to have crushes on some cartoon characters, such as the prince in The King & I (Disney Version); I’m sorry, Mom, I know that when we saw that movie we walked out because they had the Chinese bad guy have buck teeth and you educated me that it’s “ethnically ignorant” to portray people as stereotypes. But I really liked that prince and would think about him on my swing set for hours, twirling back and forth imagining that he was my boyfriend and we would have really long talks and we were both Asian so we would eat Asian food together. It’s like the day you realize you can’t sleep on clouds; very sad and humbling to understand you just can’t be the significant other of a not real person. Perhaps this imagining contributed to my late start with dating.

July 3rd

List 5 things you wish you invented:

Hug Me Pillow

July 4th

What’s the last recipe you prepared?

Tuna casserole - unashamed. I find that I eat things that I normally wouldn’t at home; it’s nice to not think of bread as a carb. It’s called breakfast.

July 5th

What made you lose track of time today?

Watching iAm orchestral rap with my boyfriend and his dad.

July 6th

What are you confident about?

Honestly, it’s pretty hard to feel confident right now. But that’s the point; I’m aware. Since I’ve been here, it’s been hard to feel like I’m good at anything; when I realize I’m feeling sorry for myself, like when my conversations are three minutes long tops because I can’t remember how to say something, I give myself permission to try again tomorrow. And try better. More creatively. I’m confident that I can find the good.

July 7

How did you do it?

Let him beat me at beer pong and head to a Colombian family’s spare bedroom for a week. Ride collectivos and feel very attracted to his Manatee Singlet.

July 8

What is the last purchase you made?

An orthopedic appointment

July 9th

Did you show someone appreciation today?

I bought a Nescafe for the German guy in my class who told me where to locate the United States on a map. His demeanor resembles a Neopalitan Mastiff. 

July 10th

What are you looking forward to?

Being able to speak to anyone in street restaurant French (i.e. “How do you go, do you want the gourmet mustard with the crocodile tears?”)

July 11th

There is no such thing as too much_____

 LOVE.

July 12th

What is the most important thing you were told today?

That what I’m doing is right now for right now.

July 13th What was the last thing you thought about today?

Why I would ask myself if I ask for too much. And also how I wore a California t-shirt and a Lao PDR bag at the same time (if people didn’t already get the message…)

July 14th What is the last book you read?

“Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002,” by David Sedaris. He’d be on my last supper list in a non Oprah dinner party way (but in a non hipster hole in the wall way) -- we could be anywhere and it’d be all good. 

July 15th What matters today?

To try. Like really try.

July 16th

What project are you working on?

An art series that’s not too hyphenated; ordering a metro ticket without the guy telling me in English how he has always wanted to go to Canada.

July 17th

Today I was so _____. intrigued by the American who waxes his Harley Davidson across from my bus stop. Whenever I roll up, he’s either walking in slow circles, as if he cannot remember what he was doing out there, or he is making no progress sorting the recycling, waiting to yell at his neighbors in English. By the looks of him, I would guess after the Vietnam War he met a French girl at a Woodstock knockoff festival while driving his motorcycle around Europe and stayed here. She might’ve dumped him after his grunting and refusal to learn French sapped her of an easy life. And he continued to buy jeans two sizes too small and ride motorcycles through nondescript residential neighborhoods in the imagined spirit of Denis Hopper. I’d like to know if Thailand will be his next move…

July 18th

The last thing I bought myself was… A hiking backpack that was less functional but a better color than the other option, which was neutral but with logos all over. It was the kind of backpack you’d see matched with eyesore dress pants for commuters back in Seattle who would be scorned by the real-milk-drinking tunic French grandmothers here. It was a lovely accoutrement to have on a hike in the Pyrenees last weekend, essential for carting the wine. While gently handling the bottle, Ao sighed: “It’s no good. I can tell by the mark on the cork.” A birthmark of a dent. He opens. Sighs again. Drinks a sip. Spits it out with vitriol. “This is undrinkable. It tastes like vinegar.” Being raised no-frills but knowing the finest of everything, the French have an ingrained and strict set of aesthetic moral standards that will prompt them to say things like: “I’d rather starve than eat that.” I decided to drink some after carrying it all the way up a rocky mountain pass. “Tastes fine to me.”

July 19th I really wish…

Trump would melt into a vat of hydrogenated oil misogynist cheap ties soup with a wall built around it.

July 20th

Who is the first person you saw today?

My boyfriend, Ao, though only half of his face because he likes to barricade the windows so that no light comes in.

July 21st

What memory do you want to keep from today?

Ao: You treat the cat like a toy. It is an animal.   Me: I really don’t like the way you said that to me. Ao: If I were the cat I wouldn’t want to be picked up like you pick it up all the time. Me: I didn’t have a cat growing up. We really need to talk about speaking to each other with kindness and respect. Ao: I really don’t want to talk about everything. Me: I don’t like to be told what to do. Just say you noticed it but don’t tell me what to do.

*Puts passive aggressive PNW flannel on and goes back to bedroom. *He enters room.

Ao: Are you upset? Me: Kind of. Ao: When I’m mad, I’m mad. When I’m happy, I’m happy. I show it. I’m French... Me: I like to talk in a calm voice about my feelings.

*He reaches for incense next to gourmet pate and wine that he keeps in the room. *Deep embrace

July 22nd

I realize tomorrow…

Is one of the three days a week that the boulangerie across the street throws packaged bread into the dumpster. And that beaucoup hippies I live with will grab them. And I will stare at my $15 hemp hearts and gladly eat the free bread.

July 23rd

What was weird about your day…

I was in a car accident but sometimes I forget to count my blessings like I did when Amelia and I were eating hospital food and holding hands and I never felt more thankful for someone to talk to when we got to wake up the next day.

July 24th

How much of your day did you spend completely alone?

Just a little; when I took a nap in Ao’s childhood vacation home bed and my body felt really, really tired from the accident. And then he crawled in next to me and I didn’t feel quite so alone.

July 25th

What word are you using too much lately?

Maintenant *right now* (“I feel ___…. RIGHT NOW!” “I’m doing this… RIGHT NOW!”)

July 26th

How was your day today?

I wore a neck brace in public today and wandered around a small French town home to medieval festivals. 

July 27th

Today I chose to look at celebrity gossip and then eat a lot of bread and cheese while writing. And hang out with my boyfriend at 2 PM because we are both unemployed (which is apparently pretty normal and not that impoverishing in France).

July 28th

Who do you wish had been a part of your day?

My friend Mary. We would be getting wine drunk and reading passages from an astrology tell-all.

July 29th

What was your weakness today?

Claiming there is life beyond Instagram and then going on instagram.

July 30th

The music genre I list to most is… HIP HOP.

July 31st

Today I felt… “humbled.” A little kicked in the nuts. Like the chemical product I brought home made me eco satan and Lang the Vietnamese girl I sit next to in French class can dance grammar circles around me. And that my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend has this melange of unassuming earthy sensual vibes because she wears the same mom jeans every time I see her (non materialistic) and is a carpenter and has a throaty nurturing voice and plays in the river with her dog (while I sit in a thong bikini hungover on a rock being scolded by my boyfriend for making a penis joke from the sausage served last night). So I felt very humbled and needed to take a nap in the car after that passed and I found a bulletin board in our room of them circa 2013-ish time holding a baby and then I needed to move the tent that is also hers that they share.

August 1st

What improvements are you making?

I can now describe my feelings like a French pop song (“It hurts!” “I want it”).

August 2nd

Share some good advice:

Have the room to yourself once a week for at least six hours of uninterrupted bliss and do whatever the hell you want to do.

August 3rd

What do you want to tell yourself in one year?

You have a job, can smell a good red wine, have a flair for clipped street pedigree French, and you’re enjoying the hell out of yourself, warts and all.

August 4th

What decision are you glad you made?

I won’t say all of them I’m glad I made because not all impulsive decisions end up leading you to a light at the end of the tunnel; sometimes they’re just very dumb (like when I used real spray paint to transform on Halloween night and had to work a double the next day with partial white hair). But I’m glad that I decided to travel on my own. And always have good girlfriends; they’re simply THE BEST.

August 5th

My body is…

An amusement park parking lot right next to a temple. 

August 6th List the people you live with… -Julien, boyfriend of Fanny (description: is the house mom, can make quiche out of the food he finds in the dumpster on Tuesdays Thursdays and Sundays, wears harem pants and kimonos, is very shy nice and contributes rock magazines and a step by step Kama sutra guide in the upstairs bathroom) -Julien #2 (has a way of whistling through his teeth when he talks and looks drunk when he talks, has a very professional tall girlfriend, musician, rarely at home) -Fanny, girlfriend of Julien (or maybe partner; very feminist, wears glasses that aren’t real, doesn’t shave armpits but somehow goes mainstream with her choice of perfume, a Petit Casino creme brûlée scented spray…) -Amalia (the exact definition of je ne said quoi, aka idolized French girl of your dreams) -Adele -Matthieu -Ao (my roommate) -Romain (mumbles and is nice and helps me with the Italian coffee maker that for the French is basic, in the U.S. C’est luxury)

August 7th

Share a favorite quote:

“It’s a terrible thing in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that no one is actually ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally thinking, now is as good a time as any.” -Hugh Laurie 

August 8th What is the last thing that made you cry? Needing to talk about things and then being told I think too much then wanting to talk about why I think so much and then feeling very asexual and confused and hangry after.

August 9th

Were you creative today? How?

I drew very snarky comics that weren’t as funny the next morning. 

My last 5 google searches:

Charlottesville Why is feminism branded Workout plan with whiplash How to say “no way” in French Why did Matt Dillon and Cameron Diaz break up in the 90’s

August 11th Where do you want to go next?

To the chair to start writing my book.

August 12th

What are you grateful for? Leftover ice cream.

What did you eat/drink today?

Whatever a machine would eat: bread and confiture, a pear, couscous salad to counterbalance and then just more bread and butter and cheese. And ice cream. And gummy bears.

August 14th

What are you looking for from life?

Being okay with deeper meaning when it’s there, okay when it’s not; that some things happen in a second, and some things pop up quietly after years then go away. Ya never know.

August 15th

What did the last text message you received say?

Trying on dresses for a wedding, Tolo 2008 what upppp #itstighter —my dearest one, Molly (we wore the same dress)

August 16th

Did you act your age today?

No, because I am 25 and went to class and the last time I did that was when I was 22. Perhaps it was the beautiful summer weather, but during break I started to feel forlorn about not having friends to enjoy this warm weather with. So in the spirit of being 18 and having just landed on campus determined to make friends, I pegged the Korean girl Helen to be my new friend. I quickly stuffed things into my bag while she spoke to the teacher, but as soon as she yelled “a demain!” she booked it out of the classroom, leaving me in her wake. “She’s busy at work with her Venice Biennalle job,” I muttered, heading to the library to do my homework.

August 17th

What was your horoscope today? Was it accurate?

Horoscope for Pisces Rising: “This week pokes around issues of your potency. Issues around feeling valued. Worthy. Wanted. Issues that will have you feeling sensitive to rejection. Sensitive to situations where you feel invisible. Blotted out. Overshadowed.Take the energy that is building within you and use it for creative projects. Let your canvases, blank pages and studios be the spaces that you use to transform any stuck energy. You are not the feelings that flood you, but you can use those feelings as a jumping off point for a great many works of art.” -Chani Nicholas

—YES. I feel all of this.