Every once in a while I look around at my life, I should really do it more often, and marvel at how I was never not going to be where I am. It was never not going to happen.
One year ago, more or less exactly, I was in my apartment in LA, overcome with the feeling that somehow along the way I’d managed to take a wrong turn and was, in fact, not living the life I was meant to live. A horrible mistake had been made.
And even though, deep down, I knew that it was impossible to have made such a mistake, it was not a good feeling. So, I made a drastic left turn and moved back to New Mexico.
One year later, this morning, I came across a journal/scrap book I kept sometime in college. The dates of torn out magazine pages and scribbled entries seem to fall between the years 2000 and 2004. I love this book. A one inch spiral bound journal overwhelmed and stuffed with images, cards, and patterns, bursting to 5 or 6 inches wide. And guess what? I haven’t changed! Images of beaches, vintage clothing, surfers, and women designing lives they love pour out of the pages. The same things I still pin on Pinterest and dog-ear in magazines.
But, the really crazy part?
I’ve manifested the whole thing! My life is the images I tore out and glued in almost twenty years ago. I have created everything I used to want and that I didn’t know how I was going to make happen.
At the time I was making aprons out of vintage tablecloths and selling them to stores. After years of saving McCall’s pattern books and drawing fashion catalogs on the kitchen table after school, I wanted to work with clothing but really didn’t know in what capacity. I wanted a beautiful home and a creative way to make money and to fall in love with a surfer so we could travel to different beaches around the world. Ding ding ding.
Did I make it happen? Did it happen because it was always meant to and all I had to do was show up? Did years of thinking the same thoughts lead me to an inevitable conclusion? And where will it lead from here?
I have no idea!!
But, it is a trip to remember how powerful we and our thoughts are and to remember that we were always heading to where we are now. Even my confusing time in LA, or time spent with the wrong guy, or saying yes to a job I regretted; it was all part of the plan. No matter how curvy the road may have been or how many left turns we take upon realizing we don’t like our trajectory. This was never not going to happen.
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I have to say, at least I still make myself laugh! Like that time I moved to LA in large part because I saw 40 approaching and was totally freaked out that it would arrive to find me in the same house, city, and career I’d been in since my mid twenties. Or that time I moved back from LA into that same house, city, and career and breathed a sigh of relief that they were all still there, two years later, patiently waiting for me to realize that none of those outward things had anything to do with inner peace, contentment, or joy.
I was recently granted one of those rare opportunities to step back into the past for just long enough to see how much everything has changed. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her book Their Eyes Were Watching God, “there are years that ask questions and years that answer,” and, after so many spent in the question phase, it is a relief to feel and see answers popping up all over my life.
My life is currently in boxes, covered in bubble wrap, and running on caffeine and meditation. The show I’ve been working on since March is coming to a close and, along with my apartment, is being packed, boxed, and moved. Though I don’t have to actually move until the end of the month, I find it easier to just do it now, little by little on my weekends, so that my brain has one less reason to wake at 3 a.m.
smagik 