Hindsight is 20/20

My life has been sort of a whirlwind the past few months, but I have finally reached a surface.

A lot of strange things happen to the human body and mind when undergoing emotional stress. When you’re living through it, you don’t think the things that you’re doing are irrational. You don’t realize how tightly you are hanging on, how frantic you’re being, and that all of these irrational behaviors were pushing a lot of people away.

The best description I can give is it feels like a bubble, at first. Your mind has slipped into a “denial” mode without you realizing it. You know you’re stressed, obviously, but you think you’re handling it. You continue to live in your world and act the way you think you normally do, but you’re not – you’re willingly turning a blind-eye to reality. Then, a trigger – a song, a photo, a feeling across the hairs on your neck – shatters everything.

And this is what happened to me.

I went through a rough few months. Graduation, an end of an important relationship, job prospects: I was fighting to hang on to everything I knew and everything I was instead of accepting the change and becoming the person I was supposed to become – an adult, dare I say. Graduation was looming over me, threatening to take away my college bliss; my relationship with someone I had strong feelings for disintegrated; jobs and the idea of moving away – all of these finally pushed me to a breaking point, where I wasn’t able to hold on to who and what I was anymore. The person I was, shattered.

But, now, seven months later, I’ve found a surface; a beginning of a new(er) person with different values and a different outlook. I’ve let go of the fact that I probably won’t be close with the same people I was close with in college. I loved someone enough to let go of an idea and future and instead be happy for the success and journey he is taking instead. I loved myself enough to let go of the past and dive in to something that I hadn’t yet experienced. And now, with baby steps, I’m making it.

The hardest thing I learned was to let go of grudges and things I couldn’t control.

It’s easy to say all of this now. Easy to sound wise and mature, once you’ve lived through the sloppy mess it actually was.

hindsight is 20/20.