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The First Goodbye of Many

I was never bad at goodbyes.

I never really hated them too much either.

Maybe it is because I always knew that if I saw someone again that would be cool, but if I didn’t that was okay too?

Maybe it is because I had my heart broken by a goodbye once and I don’t ever want to feel that pain twice? 

Maybe it is because of that silly quote about it being meant to be, then they’ll come back to me?

Well whatever it is, today’s goodbye was new.

It was the first goodbye of many.

It was more like a see ya later than a true goodbye.

It’s just that the “see ya later” will be at an unknown time.

Today’s goodbye wasn’t heartbreaking

Nor was it exhilarating

But it certainly hasn’t settled quite right.

I had to say goodbye to my newly made “family.”

Maybe it is that word, family, that keeps me from hating goodbyes? 

Because family will always be there for you, even in the hard times.

My little mismatched family will stay by side. 

Even when we’re strangers our memories will not lie.

So, maybe that is why this first goodbye of many will not haunt me tonight.

[the-christinagrace-blog]

To the student who is stressing about their future,

First and foremost I’m right there with you, as I write this I have a word document open for an internship that the application isn’t even due for another 4 months. I handle my stress by looking ahead, and I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t cause me to be more stressed. Enough about me now...

I know that thinking about the future is both terrifying and exciting, but truly nothing you think up of now is likely going to ever happen. Not to put you down or to make matters worse, but it is the truth. I never thought in a million years that I would be where I’m at today, I’m still vaguely “on track” for what young Christina expected of my life, but trust me, I had to take a few detours to get here. 

Detours are what make life exciting. If you could just sit in your room and say “I’m going to find my dream job in my dream career in exactly 2 years” life would be boring! There is no excitement in knowing. If it wasn’t for the detours, everyone would have the same exact story. The story of wanted to be successful and then becoming successful instantly. But the truth is, that the people who are the most successful, who are the happiest, who are living the lives that they always dreamed of but couldn’t ever predict, are the ones who take the detours and run with them instead of away from them. 

I know it is hard. Trust me, I’ve been there. I have expected my life would go in one direction, when in the end it went in a totally different direction that left me way better off than the the prior ever could. Out of the whim this Spring I decided to e-mail a local business to see if they were hiring for the summer after previous employment plans that I had relied so heavily on fell through. I ended up getting a job with this company and I have made friends, connections, and memories that will last a lifetime. 

Now, some of you may think, “oh, that’s never happened to me, my life is filled with disappointments.” And I know at times it may feel like that, but I challenge you to look harder, because even the smallest victory should out weigh all those hardships. It is our own outlook that gives you the ability to take the punches life throws at you or to get beaten to a pulp. 

With a simple change in the way you view your value and worth you will be able to achieve those unpredictable successes in a way you will never be able to imagine, but in a way that will be well worth it. 

[the-christinagrace-blog]

Ripple

Did you ever know 

that a word so small could create a ripple so large?

For me, that word came from a boy. 

A boy who simply introduced himself. 

Instantly I knew 

I would want to know more than just his name.

I wanted to know his smile and his tears.

I wanted to know his loves and his fears.

However, all of those things I wanted to know

were gone before I could respond with hello.

Because what I did not want to know

was that he was not mine to hold.

He was everything I had ever imagined and more

yet he simply was not for me.

It all started with a simple hello

that left a ripple beyond what my eyes could see. 

[the-christinagrace-blog]

I can't stand to think about a heart so big it hurts like Hell.

The Format

Whenever I hear the opening line to the song The First Single by The Format I chuckle a little bit. Why? Because I am that person who has a heart so big it hurts like Hell. I care for so many people and sometimes I get hurt, so much so I would even say that it hurts like Hell. 

But does that pain outweigh the joys that having a large heart bring?

Honestly sometimes I would say yes, the downfalls are powerful and painful. There have been nights where I have sat in my room crying about the fact that I care too deeply. That if only I had a little bit of a resistance to caring for others then I wouldn’t be so hurt. There have been relationships where I cared so much for the other person that I would do everything to make sure they didn’t get hurt, that I forgot that I also need to have a piece of my big heart for myself. 

That was possibly the biggest lesson I have learned in the last year. 

I lay myself down for others too much without expecting anything in return. I keep the pains that they may cause hidden, because in a relationship you’re supposed to care for each other so much that the pain which is being caused is minimal to the joy that a relationship brings, right? 

Wrong.

Sometimes in a relationship there is so much pain that you start to blur out the good times. You start to shut down and become numb. You start blaming the other person for everything, but you may never say anything. 

At least that’s what happened to me. 

I spent so much time basking in the hurt, afraid that if I told them how I felt, I would hurt them even more than they hurt me. Even when I spent days on end being anxious, sad, and sometimes even angry, my heart was still so big that I didn’t want to hurt them. 

Eventually my heart couldn’t take it anymore. 

I realized caring for others wasn’t about ignoring your own needs and I snapped. 

All of the hurt that I had been feeling for months came flooding into my words and I ended the relationship in a storm of painful relief. 

I vowed to myself to never hold back my hurt again, but that’s the thing about having a heart so big it hurts like Hell, it is almost less painful to hurt yourself than to allow someone else to be hurt by you. 

[the-christinagrace-blog]

What Happens Next?

The question that has haunted us for ages, with infinite possible answers, yet none of them seem to fit you.

I don’t know about you, but I am a planner. I have an excel sheet filled with all of the classes I have to take to graduate and when I am going to take them, I have a planner that has the times written down for just about everything from meals, to classes, to hanging out with friends, and I like to know that my plan is going to work. 

Here’s the thing though, it almost never does.

What I have had to learn through countless trials and errors is that when things don’t work out in plan A you just have to buckle up and start on plan B. I don’t think I have ever had a plan B until I found out Plan A was either not going to work whatsoever, or I had that little tiny hunch that something was about to go wrong. This has helped me to learn to go with the flow and to take punches as if I were a pillow.

As we all know life is STRESSFUL from school, to work, to money, to relationships, it’s almost like we can never catch a break. So, instead of finding fear in all of these things I have pushed myself to find joy in the chaos, to find the calm in the storm. Last semester I found out that I absolutely LOVE scheduling my classes in an excel sheet. There’s just something about knowing when the classes are supposed to be available and knowing how close you are to the finish line that is rewarding. Now, it is no surprise to me that I have a newfound affinity for scheduling my classes, because the reality is it is not new to me at all. When I was in high school I was able to enroll in college classes at a local 4 year university free of charge thanks to a state program. With each upcoming quarter I would sit down with the high school requirements I still needed to complete and the college requirements I wanted to get ahead on in front of me. I would spend hours finding the classes online, checking out the Rate My Professor reviews, and finally writing them all down on a hand written “calendar.” I would then take them to my advisor and bask in the praise she gave me for being so prepared. I loved it and I still do. It is just now my plan is further ahead than 1 quarter and it is all digital!

Now that was a lot, I know, so what’s my point? Even though I have my “4-year plan” which is now down to two, it has caused me plenty of stress, tears, and turns along the path I was taking. I have probably advised this plan 30 times, and that is no joke. There have been days where I would sit at my laptop staring at the catalog of classes and trying to find new classes I wanted to take, or ways to get out of classes that sounded dreadful. I even had a change in career path, switching from wanting to go to vet school, to wanting to go to grad school and specialize in an area that interested me even more. So, I made my plan, I changed my plan, and I will continue to do so until it is time to make a new plan. Now, whenever I feel an ounce of stress start to trickle in about my future, I grab my laptop, open up excel and just look at my plan. I read it over and take mental notes, I sometimes even look up the classes if I have forgotten what they are about. And for me, this works, knowing that no matter what my plan can be changed with just a couple clicks if something goes wrong.

I believe the important thing to remember is to not make your plans set in stone because something will go wrong, or if you’re lucky something will go so right that you never even saw it coming. That is why I love my current system, because I know visually that if I have to change my “future” I can with just a couple clicks. When all of your future planning is just in your head it seems impossible to be able to edit your expectations, but when you see it all on a spread sheet, you realize that your goals ARE tangible and you ARE going to meet them, even if you have to make a couple edits along the way.

So even if you do not know exactly what’s next, just remember that no amount of planning will ever let you know what will happen next. You’ll just have to wait and see, like everyone else on this planet.

[the-christinagrace-blog]

A New Door Opens  8/3/2019

Today is the day I begin writing, whether or not I keep to it is all up to fate. These last few months my mind has been begging me to release my thoughts from my head, that wasn’t within a journal for my own two eyes. Now, the odds are this blog won’t gain much of a following, if any, but nonetheless I will write my thoughts out for the world to see. 

Have you ever seen those Odyssey blog posts? All about “to the girl that... blah blah blah” I have read too many of them to count, and with each varying message one aspect was always the same: they never satisfied my expectations by giving me the answers I was looking for. It often left me teary eyed and even more lost than I was before beginning my 12 AM trek into the world of my unspoken questions. I guess sometimes you need to have answers left unspoken too, but really it only created confusion and the desire for more. 12 AM would quickly turn into 3 AM, and late nights would turn into early mornings. So, I figured why not try being the one to give the advice? After all, what could go wrong? 

Apparently a lot.

With my newfound ambition to become one of those girls with cute blog posts and answers to other’s 3 AM terrors I decided to start up an Odyssey account. However, me not being the most tech savvy person ever and trying to get around all of those personal information questions, I eventually gave up in my Odyssey dreams. I had wanted to remain at least semi anonymous, and Odyssey is just not a place for that persona.

So I decided to try out Wix. 

As I was making the website I grew impatient and gave up when trying to find a theme for my blog, none of them just felt like me. They were all placed into little boxes that I didn’t want to be a part of. They all felt too professional for me, after all this is just a place for my mind to wander. 

So as a last resort I came back to my roots, to the place that I had known in the past and had loved every second of it until I grew too busy for keeping up with the community I had joined so many years ago. 

It was a rough reboot to say the least. I figured I would just change around my old blog a little bit. To give it a fresh coat of paint I guess you could say. As I went through the pages of my old Tumblr account, which was a role playing account I had made for my OC Izzy. I got reminiscent and realized I couldn’t just delete her story. It was just as much my story as it was hers. You cannot simply erase parts of your life in order to start fresh, they will always be there with you. So, I made a new e-mail, made a new account, found a fresh theme (after A LOT of trial and error), and played around with editing it into what I had envisioned. Which brings us here, to a newly opened door, a fresh beginning, so I can finally get what I have to say out into the world. 

Enjoy.