Reassurance

New year and a shinny new blog to go along with it! It’s been literally months since I’ve posted, I’m sorry dear internet friends, I must have written the beginning to this blog countless times these past couple months and I always lost the ambition to finish it, but I persevere and here I am. And which brings me to what I’ve (finally) decided to write about for this post. But let me quick catch you up to speed on my life since mid-November. If for some reason you have been living under a rock in regards to my life or if my bombardment of pictures wasn’t enough, I got a cat! Cue gushing. He is this scruffy mass of fur that I scooped off a friend’s porch (Thanks Schatzman family!) and is an absolute rascal. He eats food that doesn’t belong to him, consistently wakes up too early to pester me, and coos like a pigeon to assert his cuteness. Overall, I’m just smitten. Otherwise that’s probably been the biggest change, Spring semester classes are in full swing and they’ve kept me pretty busy. Let’s get back to the thought in question, enough talk of cute kitties.

Today’s topic is rather a dense one for me to unpack and is a good portion of the reason why it’s taken so long for me to finally write it. For those of you that are very close to me, you already know that the fall semester was one of the hardest times of my life, I was dealing with some depression and as well just an overall feeling of lack of belonging as well as direction in my life. As someone who has attended three different universities, it has been difficult to put any type of roots down in one place, this semester actually marks the longest I’ve been at a school since high school. My freshman year was spent at Carroll University before doing a semester abroad in Aberystwyth, Wales and then jumping to UW-Madison halfway through my sophomore year. It was a lot of transitioning followed by a breakup with someone I had dated for five years, needless to say I finally feel like the dust is settling after these past three years. I’m at a school that I absolutely adore and am still discovering the things that I enjoy, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t hard to get to the place that I’m currently at.

My entire life, I had always been the person who knew what they wanted from their life, the planner and the person with the sense of direction. Lately that has really changed, I have ideas of what I’d like to do, for instance, when I graduate but no real concrete plans; I am not 100% certain what I want to do with my degree or where I want to live or even what type of person I hope to emulate, just ideas that keep changing and are increasingly, but not surprisingly, shaped by the people I meet. For me this is something I have had a lot of trouble coming to terms with and I think that part of the reason for that is that the people around you always seem like they have it together. There is such a struggle for…perfection? I’m not even sure if that’s the word I want to be using. We see peoples lives through their accomplishments or from their social media. Accomplishments that we often don’t see the work that was put in to earn it and, in case of social media, the time spent behind a screen to come up with the witty caption or perfectly constructed photograph. If you’ll excuse the pun, we only get the snapshot of their life that they’ve carefully organized for the public to see. Perhaps my stating this is simply a reassurance for myself, but perhaps, dear reader, it can also serve as a reassurance for you too. We often don’t fully realize what someone’s life is like, and we tend to assume that they have a better sense of direction than we do. But here is a confirmation that often times, someone’s life isn't as polished as we would believe. Life will continue on, at times we will feel lost, but there is comfort in knowing you are not alone.

-T