Settle

I can't sleep and after having been deprived internet for a week, I felt a very huge pull to this blog, this 4am in the morning. I'm not exactly sure what I feel or why I feel it, and suddenly I'm so unsteady. The answers never seem easy anymore and every day, it seems that life is harder and harder, that we have to make tougher decisions than the day before, that we must fight find the right thing, even if we have no idea what that may be. I wonder sometimes when balance will return to the way I live, when I will stop trading things I think I liked for things that I'm not sure if I can like again. This six months of my life have tested me... beyond anything I have ever felt. And while it may look like I have come out on the other side unscathed, it is quite the opposite. There are scars, there are hugely open and unhealed scars, of the places that have tested me life in the last half year, and they are wounds that will take some time to heal, wounds that will always be with me a little bit from now on. I can't even begin to describe the roller coaster of emotions I have been on this year and as I look back, this has been one of the hardest years of my entire 23 years of life. All you have to do is read my back blogs starting in May and see the journey, though journey seems to have too much of a positive connotation, but rather perhaps a road of lessons is better coined.

And there tonight lays my empty apartment on the islands. With it's balcony, and tile floors. And a very large part of me misses it, a very large part of me has grown very accustomed to life there, and while the cons outweigh the pros, I was at a point where I was at peace with it all, and somehow my little apartment overlooking Kalakaua avenue took me away from it all. A big part of me is still left in Hawaii, whether I like it or not. My parents, who I have grown close to all over again, my one and only ever little convertible, my first apartment paid for on my own, my office, my jamba juice and starbux. I did build a life there, and though I hate the hot year-round and the beauocracies of Hawaii are my biggest pet peeve, I still have a part there. I did have my own little place there, however removed it might have been.

There are moments when I wonder if I am giving up the right things and if once again, am I trading it all too early? Am I making the right choice and if so, why do I feel like I'm letting so many down? I hate that I have to make the choice, I hate that I can't have the best of both worlds, but I don't think that's entirely possible. and maybe it shouldn't be. All I know is that I have a very different lifestyle than most of the people in my life, and sometimes, I feel so alone, so out of touch with most of the people in my life. Lost in the shuffle, with no one to really feel the pain with me.

And in my young life, I have endured this lonely lost-ness before, this unsurity, this moment of weakness when I don't know where to turn. It's happened numerous occasions in my young life and while I am no stranger to it, I am definitely no where used it yet and every time, I look back on the past experience and wonder how I made it through. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been different if I had had more of a conventional upbringing, or if no matter what I went through in life, this is how I would end up. How much does nature affect nurture and vice versa?

So I sit here at 5 in the morning, in the cold rainy Northwest, the place I know call home, both physically and emotionally at the moment and I can't help but hope the day will bring peace. And I think back to Hawaii, to my parents who I have so immensely enjoyed laughing with, having dinner with, just being with, to my sleeping little apartment with the balcony I've always wanted. This is going to take some getting used to, some adjusting to be back here. And while this is home, I've been so unsettled for so long, so pushed through the motions, one plane ride after another, that I'm going to have to find peace yet again, and I'm going to have to settle myself and my soul.

It's ironic that my life has turned out the way it has, because it seems that every time I get settled somewhere, something else comes up that makes me make a change and from that consequent change, come this period of resettling and of wondering if I made the right choice. It's been that way my whole life, when I moved to Portland on my own for college, when I switched schools, when I moved in with Nick and gave up my little pink apartment, when I moved to Hawaii, and now when I've "moved" back.

But life must go on, and as much as we sometimes need it to, the world will not stop for our panic. It will not wait for us to find peace in order to go on again, and so we must live and breathe and move on all at once. And while I feel so very exposed, lonely, lost, unsure, scarred, pained, and unready, I must move on to settle myself once again and find peace in my soul. Only time will tell but for now, here is yet another change, yet another move, yet another step along the way.