Long time, no blog post.

I’m starting today’s blog post without any sense of direction as to where it will go (in fact, I titled it after it was written). I was thinking last night about how my intuition to write is usually tied with how inspired, regulated, free, and understood I feel. The last one is a big one. I often think that I can’t write a blog post until I have all of my emotions about a situation or season figured out. Then, I can come here and write out all of my neatly numbered takeaways.

But sometimes, writing a blog post can help me come to a conclusion or reminder that I didn’t have before. The truth is, I have been feeling inspired and calm and I do have free time, but I’m still reflecting on a lot of things. I’ve been asking God: why did that happen? what’s next for me? Am I making the right decisions?

Junior year was probably the best year of college so far. I feel like I always look back at freshman year with so much fondness and nostalgia, so it’s really hard to compare it to anything else. But compared to sophomore year, junior year was far and away 10x better. Not only do I feel like I had so many new experiences and joy, but I grew as a person in the areas of emotions, friendship, and faith.

I look back on the year with a lot of gratitude, yet there’s still this small knot in my stomach. Maybe it’s the yearning for my friends who are graduating, the grief for situations that ended unfavorably, or the fact that I’m not going back to Evanston this fall, and I know that when I come back, nothing will be the same as I have known it to be the last three years.

A thought that I have been sitting with recently is this idea that life is simply a series of paradoxes (did I see this on TikTok? yk what hell yeah!):

your dream job is the one that you stress over

your favorite memories are the ones that you miss the most

the people you love are the people you fight with

And what you love is what you will grieve

Whatever happiness we find in this life will ultimately cause us pain because it doesn’t stay forever.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. The end of college is closer than ever before. It is exciting and scary, and I’ve had to start thinking about what I want my life to look like post-grad.

Some say those years are the hardest because it’s the first time in so many of our lives where things aren’t planned out for us. Before, there has always been a clear “next step” and now, it’s up to us.

When I arrived in LA for my internship this summer, I was admittedly scared. I put my bags down on an empty apartment floor and thought to myself “is this what I want my life to look like after college?”: moving to a new city, no friends, no family, little money, an exciting new job, but so much uncertainty?

It got me thinking about how everything comes with a cost. You can move to the new city in pursuit of a job, but then you leave the friends that you know. You can stay near your family, but then miss out on the opportunity to meet new people. As Taylor Swift puts it, “everything you lose, is a step you take.” And how wonderful and scary that is.

The freedom that comes with post-grad life is in and of itself another paradox.

You are in charge of yourself 😦

You are in charge of yourself! 🙂

If you don’t like your job, you have to be the one to change it.

If you don’t like your friends, you have to be the one to find new ones.

If you’re feeling uninspired, you have to seek inspiration.

If you hate the city you live in, you have to figure out how to get to a new one.

There’s this quote from an interview with Stephen Colbert where he says “what punishments from God are not also gifts?”. We have the option to enjoy our lives and enjoy all of it and take the moments of discomfort to make them into something great.

It kind of is this endless cycle of excitement, and fear, and action, and fear, and excitement, and relief. So what to do?

I think that’s where joy comes in…? Jesus is the only person or thing that I can think of that can provide the everlasting feeling of security and safety that all of us are seeking.

The best friendships don’t stay the same forever, our best memories are only for a moment, and everything in life is simply a season.

“The grass withers, the flower fades,
    but the word of our God will stand forever.” Isaiah 40:8

I don’t have the answers to life, or grief, or the deathly nostalgia that chases me every night… but I do have this.

As always,

Thanks for reading ❤