5 on a Friday
I’m throwing it back to my old school blogging days. And by that I mean I used to do this religiously. Back in my old blog, in my old life. A life that feels so far removed from me it doesn’t even feel like mine anymore. I really thought I was something when I was 15, and it’s that same sense of cocky confidence that has moved me through every stage of my life thus far. I’m into me. Like I really like myself, I like being with myself, I like being in my body. It wasn’t always this way, I was not immune from the teenage angst, and in fact I think I had so much angst because I was so self aware, but I think one of my guiding lights throughout my life is I’ve always had this sense of who I am and what I’m about. I’ve had people tell me I’m full of myself, like an insult, but like yeah, I kinda am. I think people waste a lot of time trying to be cool or pretending they’re not weird or being something other than authentic to try and fit in, and I realized recently how stupid that looks. It’s the trying not to look stupid that actually makes someone look stupid. And I love that I’m in a phase of my life where I can recognize that now.
I’m writing this curled up in the sunshine. I think I’m like a cat in that aspect. I love the hygge and coziness of winter, but I never realize how much I miss the sun until I can step out onto my balcony bare foot and not have to put on a sweater and it just feels like a big exhale. I had to go into town to run some errands today, and I got a spiced vanilla latte from a local coffee place, and then I recorded a spring inspired yoga flow for the loss to love app, and planned my yoga class for tonight. And I’m just feeling this spring energy embodied. Life is waking up again. I’m waking up again.
Yesterday was Paris’s birthday. And I wrote a whole post on that, and on it being 6 years and what that means to me. Because it means a lot. 6 years has also felt like the first one that nobody really paid attention to. The first 5, that’s a big deal. By year 6 there’s some unspoken thought that you should have this figured out by now. Which in a way, I feel like I’ve very much grown around my grief. It’s not the acute, all consuming thing it used to be. And I am who I am because of them. If I hadn’t been Paris’s mom, I don’t know who I’d be, and that experience shaped everything about who I am as a person. Paris’s mom is courageous and brave and kinda badass and I kinda love her. A lot of what we tend to focus on when we talk about death is the grief part, the over part, but what I’m learning about death is its also the coming alive part, the renegotiating of a relationship.
I’ve been thinking about getting older. I took a photo recently and you can see the wrinkles around my eyes, the smile lines and sun spots. And we live in a society that would rush to cover those up, remove the evidence of a life well lived, look as young as possible for as long as possible. It’s also probably my favourite thing about myself currently. I love the fact that I’m getting wrinkles, and grey hair, and I look older. I can’t wait to see what I’m going to look like at 40, and 50 and 60. Growing older feels like a really fulfilling experience for me, and I wonder how much of that is attached to the fact that I almost didn’t get to, and I have this embodied understanding that life is short. Getting older is proof of life.
I haven’t written like this in a long time. I write for a living. I help people tell their stories and I facilitate story circles and I write for a number of different platforms on things like embodied rituals and grief. I’m in the process of writing a book (I can’t keep track of how long I’ve been saying that for but I promise I am) and I’m showing up in this storied space every day, but something about the ease and fun I find in these Friday 5s feels juicy and delicious. I’m trying to do more things that are fun, and make me happy. Life feels heavy sometimes, and I’m currently (always) in the middle of grieving things, so I’m intentionally curating that energy of life can begin again and I can trust what lights me up.
