New

It’s amazing the ways in which a person changes, subtly, day by day, with such restraint that the developing differences are as undetectable as hair getting longer or new freckles forming.

I just read through this entire blog.
I am different than when I first started writing over a year and a half ago.
I’m different but very much the same, very much more “me” in many ways.

I’m different externally – my hair is much longer, my body is trimmer and more mature. My teeth are more stained from many cups of hot tea, my hands and feet are more taken care of from a new found love of mani-pedis, my lips and the corners of my eyes are more wrinkled from hours and hours and hours of laughing.

The core of me is the same, only more me, more who I am meant to be. Often times, stripping away all the nonsense is the only way to grab hold of oneself, but there are certain phases of life when, to know oneself more completely, acquisition is what’s asked of you. New people, places, thoughts, emotions. Sometimes you have to put on to release. You have to acquire to know what to leave behind.

Other times, no. Other times, you have to sift through the murk of mental and physical excess and re-find yourself beyond the depths of the superfluous.

I have done a lot of all these things this past year, maybe more so than ever before, but it doesn’t feel like it. This year has been one of inevitable exploration, testing and growth, but its inevitability has rendered the journey almost effortless. Not painless or without its moments of scathing sorrow, but effortlessly there, happening, relentlessly tugging and speaking to me.

I have found bits and pieces of me in new places, and I have recognized myself in new people and ideas. I have shed layers of myself I thought I could never part with, and I’ve sloughed off edges and corners of myself that died long ago. Where there was a chrysalis at the dawn of this new decade, a new creation has emerged, standing over an open cocoon with gratitude and sadness, knowing things will never be the same, because things were never meant to stay the same in the first place.