Writer’s Block

Ideas incomplete and drafts half written. I feel like everything has been coming up short lately. My thoughts are whole and alive and full of movement, until I try to put them onto paper. I think and rethink and overthink. I write and rewrite and scrap. Nothing comes out quite important, meaningful enough. Nothing quite captures what I need it do. And there are such beautiful things to write about. Like a weekend tucked away in the mountains with friends, the laughter and sparklers and tipsy rambling, the moment I realized I finally feel like a valued part of something bigger and more meaningful again. Or like the little ways love reveals itself, the way he removes renegade eyelashes from my cheek or the way the palm of his hand always finds its way to mine, the daily sacrifices and companionship and boundless support. These are the moments that make me want to write but break my heart when I find that I can’t. I feel these moments wanting to burst out from beneath my skin, I feel them stretching for light toward my fingertips. I want to write about how the cool mountain breeze revitalizes my heart and breathes life back into me, about that moment when the earth stood still and everything faded into the sound of my breathing and the gentle embraces of the water on shore. I want to write about how the sunlight frolicked on the lake’s surface and how moments like this can bring your heart back home again. It’s frustrating when your words stop coming like second nature, when your mode of solace is distant from you, when part of your identity suddenly feels foreign and difficult to grasp at. But I’ll keep grasping, putting pen to paper, fingertips to keys. I will remember what it feels like for my thoughts to effortlessly pour out into words, to decorate a plain white page with observations and concerns and dreams. I will remember what it feels like for light to drift freely through my mind, illuminating my ideas into something worthy of the moments that inspired them, stringing my musings together into words of sincerity and beauty.

When True Love Does Exist

For so long I have yearned for a love that would move mountains, for a love that seems like it has only ever been sung about; a love that brings tears to the eyes of those who witness it, who appreciate it and envy it. I always thought love was a fleeting substance, like the universe was teasing its occupants with this unobtainable feature, this fictional substance.

I look at myself, almost 23 years old. I look at the years of my adult life, look at the love I thought I had, the love I lost, and the foolishness around the emotion. I have a lot of thoughts running through my mind at all hours of the day and I would be lying if I said the majority of them didn’t settle on the topic of love. Who is worthy of love? Who deserves my love? Who’s love do I deserve? When will love happen? What is the true meaning of love? Will love be enough?

I like to think I have my priorities straight when it comes to the thought of love, a beautiful and vibrant emotion that means so much more than a union between two like-minded individuals. But those four little letters mean so much.

I love my friends, and I would do anything for them, but it is through their secret little actions that the love becomes a blinding energy when we are together. I love the way my best friend always knows how to make me smile and I love how alike we are. I love how we read each other’s minds. I love her cute little laugh. Such a love, such a bond, that is rare for some to understand without feeling it themselves. Yet her and I are not in love. We do not have a desire to join our hands and become one. We both understand that we are two pieces of the same soul, or soul family, and we love each other in ways that only family can.

But then there is that red hot love, the emotion you feel when he looks at you, when you make eye contact or he puts his arms around you. But this love is the one you have to look out for. It consumes, and although it can be invigorating, it can also burn. And I have been burnt. But I’ve also seen things that you only read about in story books.

Right after my relationship ended I didn’t want to believe in love. I had thought he was the one, until one day I knew he wasn’t. That one day when I started caring more about appearances than the actual people. I stopped caring about myself, stopped recognizing that I was no longer in love, I was just in love with the idea of it. I pushed the idea around in circles, hoping that the longer I sat on it the more chances I had to fix it. I believed that the “love” I was in was maybe just in need of repair. I believed in fate. I believed in soul mates. Why would the universe send me someone I wasn’t meant to be with? Why was I the one, who wished so long and hard for an endless love, who was slowly watching her vision of love fall apart?

When we parted ways, the idea of romance fell away and I replaced it with a love of a different sort: a love of myself. I threw my mind and emotions into the same energy, but one that filled me with light, with happiness. I began to realize that it wasn’t just about being in love with someone, but it was simply about being in love. With the world, with yourself, with your life.

I fall in love every day, with adorable customers or actions of one of my animals. I love the way I am beginning to surround myself with people who have quirks and qualities that I repeatedly fall in love with, with the stories we share and the photos we’ve taken. I fall in love every time I take another look at those photos, when I remember the emotions felt during those times of bliss. The love felt as we hugged it out or laughed until our sides hurt. That is love, plain and simple. That is love in its purest form, where you love, and you accept, and flaws don’t have any meaning.

But then I see what is missing. It is not for a lack of love, but it is for a lack of the last piece of love. The love that consumes. The love that moves mountains, that people look at and all they can do is stop and smile, because the love is one that is so bright. I hear the songs and part of me has a hard time envisioning this love, but I have always been a hopeless romantic and I have always held the idea of love in my heart. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that I see this love around me, in two, if not more, separate couples that circle in my group of friends. I see this love and it gives me hope that this feeling is more than something just written about in songs.

I know I will find this love because I believe if you dream it, you wish it, you will end up doing it. And I know, with proof shown in the aforementioned couples, that a love like this truly does exist.

You may not believe in love, trust me, I didn’t either. But now I do. And even though I’m not in a relationship, I have to remind myself that there really is no rush because I know that when I do find the person I am meant to be with, we will have a love that moves mountains, a love that others look to because they know it is one for the books.

| cassie

Happiness & Malleability: Finding Solace in the Unknown

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, of what it holds and my fears surrounding it. I get lost in my own mind, running circles around what I can’t control and what I do not know. My uncertainty and doubt can be crippling at times. It’s a bit silly, I think. I feel like it’s been ingrained in me to be overwhelmingly concerned about my future, to make choices based on the career I want when I’m older and the family I’ll have one day. I was asked throughout my entire adolescent life what I wanted to be when I grew up. And then seemingly overnight upon turning 16, the casual curiosity turned into persistent interrogation. At a time when my life was devoted to learning through relationships, discovering and exploring my passions, and facing my emotional fragility, I was now being asked to decide what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be for the rest of my life. I barely had the capacity to cope with my life at the time let alone consider what it was to be like for the next decade and onwards.

However, I’ve realized something about my heart and my dreams lately that has been strangely comforting: they change, grow, shift. It wasn’t until I was 19 when I figured out what I thought I wanted to do with my life. I had everything clearly and definitively mapped out. I was going to become a high school English teacher, buy a house, get married, and have kids by the time I reached my late twenties. I wanted to have an upper middle class family, live in a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, be part of book clubs, host dinner parties, have mid-week coffee dates with my girlfriends and our kids. So I went back to school, but my experience with post-secondary education deeply disappointed me (I talk about that here). One of the most challenging aspects of that situation was knowing that the decision I had to make was going to directly impact the future I had already imagined I would have; I would either have to postpone it or let it go entirely. And it broke my heart, tore me to pieces having to put that dream at risk.

It’s been almost six months since I wrote that piece about my fear and deep unhappiness with school. And although my plans for the distant future are still just as uncertain and terrifying as they were then, I’m in a much more peaceful place about it. Because I realized that I was letting my fear of the future disturb my state of mind in the present. I was allowing this imagined fantasy of what I thought I wanted get in the way of me living my life in the way that I’ve actually always dreamed: in happiness, in passion, in pursuit of soulful fulfillment. And the more I think about it, I’m not even sure if my future happiness lies with kids and a big house in the suburbs anymore. The more I think about it, that dream may have never actually been my own but instead one that was ingrained in me to want since childhood — not from anybody in particular, but from society as a whole.

Lately, I’ve started trading that idea in for a new one. I find myself dreaming of a future embracing something I’ve always feared: uncertainty. I dream of endlessly wandering the globe, never having a permanent address, never really knowing which city is next. I dream of living minimally, staying in tiny apartments just big enough for the two of us and our favourite books. I imagine eating breakfast on the living room floor, sharing the newspaper and sitting right where the morning light pours through the windows. I imagine us learning different languages, meeting people from all corners of the globe and listening to their stories. I imagine working day jobs that we manage to find joy and fulfillment in, regardless of what the work entails. I imagine evenings and weekends spent wandering the streets and outskirts of the city, finding beautiful hidden places to write and play music and read together.

And maybe my future will look entirely different in a way that I can’t even imagine right now. Maybe I’ll look back in thirty years and laugh about how absurd these ideas sound. I don’t feel entirely confident in not knowing, but I’m learning to. I’ve just spent far too much time worrying about what’s going to happen in five, ten, twenty years. I know that I’m supposed to start thinking like a grown-up, I know that life brings hardships and realities that I’ll have to face. But right now, I am twenty-two years old and I refuse to let my fear of the future swallow up my present. I think we just get so caught up in what we’re supposed to do that we lose sight of what we want to do; we get so overwhelmed in the pressures of the future that we forget that our twenties are for figuring it out as we go along, finding our passions, carving our path.

Your life and its direction can change in a matter of a seconds. And that can be terrifying, until you realize that what you want from it can change just as easily. In the midst of all this fearing for your future, try not to forget that life can be happily lived in so many different ways. Try to not let it scare you that your future could be entirely different than how you’ve imagined, because it could end up so much better. Your dreams and your life are going to change and grow and shift. There is liberation in that. And I hate to pull an Emerson on you, but the journey really is the destination. So appreciate life and its wonderful malleability, and embrace the adventure in the unknown. Go out there and live out your journey with as much passion and fearlessness as you possibly can.

| alex

The Kind of Love You Deserve

You deserve balmy summer nights sitting lakeside with someone who gives you butterflies; nervous fingers reaching to interlock with yours, sweaty palms, gentle squeezes; unashamed confessions of admiration, sincere compliments, persistent and kind honesty.  You deserve a night of stars dancing on rippling water, shivers rolling down your spine, the moonlight illuminating sideways glances and uncontrollable smiles. You deserve inside jokes and laughing your stomach into knots, cheeks red and faces glowing. You deserve a night of childhood stories and secrets shared, weird habits exposed, scars revealed. You deserve falling-irrevocably-in-love moments you thought only true of screenplays and fairytales.

You deserve late Saturday nights watching the sun set and rise again, first and second and twentieth kisses shared among fireflies and twinkling starlight. You deserve enveloping embraces, cool breeze waltzing between your limbs, nose pushed against threads of cotton carrying your new favourite scent. You deserve hours of thoughtful conversation, every sentence punctuated with eskimo-, butterfly-, every-kind-of kisses.

You deserve sleepy Sunday mornings drifting in and out of consciousness, shifting between dreams, always fitting puzzle-piece-perfect against one another upon waking. You deserve dancing in your pajamas while making breakfast, sunlight leaking through the windows, the smell of coffee in the air. You deserve singing 90’s pop songs with spoon and spatula microphones, whirling around one another, cracking eggs and sprinkling spices. You deserve entire days in bed kissing birth marks and scars, tracing constellations out of freckles with your fingertips, learning the taste of each other’s laughter.

You deserve sun-kissed adventures, last-minute and kind-of-irresponsible vacations, booking flights and mapping routes. You deserve overcoming fears and taking risks, venturing into great unknowns together. You deserve salty kisses on tropical beaches and bike rides through small towns. You deserve road trips through deserts and big cities, 30-hour flights across oceans and continents. You deserve card games at bus stops and walking hand-in-hand through seaside markets. You deserve hundreds of different backdrops to your love story and hundreds of different languages to tell it in.

You deserve first, fifth, thirtieth anniversaries, homemade gifts stitched together with love and surprises thought out months in advance. You deserve the overcoming of obstacles together, the ebb and flow of lifelong love. You deserve afternoons painting bedrooms and wiping colours off each other’s earlobes, evenings assembling Ikea furniture with glasses of wine. You deserve building forts out of moving boxes, backyard camping, and picnics on your living room floor. You deserve memories of a quiet afternoon nestled together in bed, shadows dancing on the pages of your books, the feeling that in his arms you’ve found home. You deserve pinky-promises kept and mistakes forgiven, kisses stolen and a hand always held.  You deserve decades strung together with old photographs and love notes, wrinkles carved from laughter.

This is the kind of love you deserve.

| alex