show me how good it gets
You see, when I imagined my senior year of college, I expected this magical, golden, vivid supercut of endless joy. I went into this last year of my undergraduate experience truly believing I had it all figured out, that I had everything perfectly in place.
I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
To give myself some credit, you can’t really prepare yourself for heartbreak or having longterm plans fall through. As a perfectionist and a planner, when things don’t go accordingly to my intricately detailed five-year plan, I freeze. I can’t function. I have no idea where to go or what to do. And that’s exactly how this semester began for me.
Two months ago, I was in extremely dark place in my life. I received some news that challenged what I had believed, what I had thought to be true, and it honestly wiped the ground out from under me. I was a mess. I didn’t go to class. I didn’t eat. I didn’t leave my bed. I just slept all day, wishing with my entire being that I’d glean some reason as to why humans have to go through emotional and mental anguish like that. I’ve always liked to be perceived as this person who always has her shit together, but I was unraveling in front of everyone.
I truly believed that I didn’t have the strength to fight it anymore.
There was one night that this pain became all consuming. As someone who has dealt with anxiety and depression my entire life, you think I’d have it down by now to identify depressive thoughts from true, logical thoughts, but alas, I don’t. Depression and anxiety are vicious - it weasels into your life and turns the good parts to rust; it snakes your way into the bad parts of your life and burns them to ash. On this specific night, I prayed and prayed and prayed that the universe would just get it over with and just end my life right then.
Much to my annoyance that night, the universe silently declined to do so.
However, the question I kept begging to be answered by any higher power still stood: how can the joy of life outweigh that kind of pain and turmoil?
Fast forward to the middle of March: I went on my first (and last) spring break trip with some of my closest friends. Our first night in Myrtle Beach, we ventured out to the ocean with our glasses of red wine and danced on the beach in the glow of the moon (and rain, I might add). I felt so at peace just listening to the waves, feeling the wind in my hair and the sand beneath my feet, a thousand miles away from everything. I felt like something within me settled. A calming of the storm, a break in the clouds, a peek of light at the top of the trench I felt like I was in.
I felt a little bit of the weight I had been carrying for months float away (just so I could replace that weight with all the seashells I had started to collect on this trip). Instead of living minute by minute, I began to live hour by hour, day by day, and then moment to moment. My favorite foods started to taste better (much to everyone’s relief, pasta does cure all problems), and I began to find the joy in the mundane.
But it was early on in my healing journey, I came across this affirmation:
Show me how good it gets.
I’ve never been one to write inspirational quotes or affirmations down, but I immediately wrote it on a Post-It note and put it on my bathroom mirror. I thought to myself that since I knew exactly what rock bottom looked like for me, it can’t get any worse than it already had. I didn’t have the emotional capacity to worry about the past, about the pain I was dealing with in the present, or how my future plans had been interrupted. I simply let go of control - and asked the universe to just show me exactly how good life can get.
And you know what’s insane? The minute I let go of desperately trying to have everything planned, analyzed, solved, figured out - that’s when life fell into place. (Talk about contradicting everything I assumed I knew as a perfectionist!!!) I wasn’t living day to day, instead I was living moment to moment. I wasn’t trying to overanalyze all of the intense turmoil I had endured, instead I was healing and growing from it. And most importantly,
I wasn’t trying to fight the universe anymore.
(Not to get all metaphysical, but fighting the universe is impossible. It drains you of all emotional and physical and mental energy you have. Cannot NOT recommend this enough.)
So when I now think about my confusion as to how life can be worthwhile if humans deal with intense pain, trauma, hardship and heartbreak, I realize that there’s a balance to everything, at least in this instance. How could I have found this new sense of appreciation for the people in my life, the new memories to create, and new experiences to, well, experience? It took an unplanned time of turmoil to not take what I have for granted. I was too busy looking to the future instead of enjoying where I was in the present moment, flaws and all.
While my senior year hasn’t been this flawlessly perfected supercut of checking every box, being happy 24/7, doing all the things, I don’t think I’d change a single thing. I was settling for what I thought I deserved instead of embracing the unknown that I would come my way if I just. let. go.
Although I’m not anywhere near being completely “healed”, I can confidently say that life has been showing me lately just how good life can get. The universe had bigger and better things planned out for me, and I’m starting to find exactly that.
