the first (roughly) 365 chances at adulting

Eight days ago marked one year since I graduated from Coe College. Five days from now marks one year since I moved to Des Moines. Against the cliche suggestion, it does not all feel like just yesterday. Somehow I've experienced forever.

I've avoided writing this piece. Part of me craves nostalgia, stories, memories...the other part wants to pretend that my first year of the Real World didn't include certain pitfalls. Yes, I could write this that way. As a storyteller, I can craft my words to depict the perfect experience. Yet I won't lie.

Instead, I will tell my remembered truth.

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One year ago, I cried over the people I considered my best friends. Although already gone, I still felt unprepared to leave them. Most of those friends stayed in a chapter I've closed since then. At the time, I mostly missed living across the hall from the person I considered my dearest friend. Since then, we went from spending four or more hours on the phone nightly to planning the future of our potential family to what felt like the world's most crushing breakup. "Love isn't real," I thought. They are still with the girl they secretly dated during the entirety of our relationship, and I am now happier than I've ever been. When Andrea Gibson told me that things would work out how they should, I didn't believe them. I know better now. 

I also know that ex isn't the only person to ever love and lie, to treat me less than my worth, to claim "unconditional" with a whole slew of conditions. Perhaps that is the greatest lesson adulthood has emphasized so far. People lie. Feelings hurt. Hearts break.

But other people with lie with you, make you laugh until your feelings smile, and build a new bridge from your heart to your soul.

When you find those people, let them go. You read that right. Let them go.

Let them find their own path. Let them discover their love and losses. Let them laugh into places you've never ventured, and cry into voids you don't know. Let them find their way back to you, if at all, because if life is supposed to happen with them, there they will be.

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In the past year, I've connected with hundreds of humans--none of them strangers. Families I have served at work have known not only the town in which I grew up but also the names of families I left there. Concerts, poetry readings, and nature walks have led to conversations about art (the feelings invoked and the memories formed). Coffee shop walls hold laughter and tears from dates gone well and awry. Far too many bartenders remember moments that I don't.

But that's changing.

When I graduated college, I set a goal to focus on sobriety. A few weeks later, after moving out of the three homes in which I split the prior three years, I laid on a leaky air mattress, in an apartment with people I didn't know before moving in and a bottle in my hand. I failed. And I failed again. And again. and again.

Growing up, I always stated, "My number one goal in life is to never drink." For more reasons than I'll share, it was more important to me than nearly anything else. For now, I'm working to add on, "ever again."

Without a long story, I can say that my depression, anxiety, and PTSD all used the numbing, fake happiness that drunken nights--or mornings or days or weekends--brought. I didn't have to feel. I didn't have to face anything that I didn't like. That's not how I want to live.

I can do difficult things.

I can graduate college Cum Laude a year early, despite working nearly full time and spending a semester off campus. I can move to an unknown city for a job and quit it six days later. I can walk a couple miles to a random concert at my first Pride Fest, walk up to a warm group, and say, "My name is Lacee, and I'm new here. Can I join y'all?" I can write a book, and I can face the reality that it's still unpublished. I can survive the deaths of mentors & friends , and I can remember them strongly. I can travel across five states for the sake of doing nothing else. I can live through months of unemployment and frequent urges to give up on my dreams. I can end friendships, and I can form new ones. I can spontaneously travel to Vegas to see a friend I miss more than I care to admit. I can work 50-60 hours a week while prioritizing my physical and mental health. I can tell people how I feel. I can tell myself how I feel. I can feel.

Today marks 12 days since my last drink. That might not seem like much, but since the start a few years ago, I've only ever reached 12 days once before. My typical quitting time has historically been three.

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I don't share any of this for pity nor support, but rather because my anxiety is telling me to not. I chose this month's book club read (Brave, Not Perfect by Reshma Saujani), and an excerpt struck a chord today. While I sat in Midas, tired from waking up at 4:30am to drive two hours (after falling asleep after 11pm, ending a day of trekking across the state of Nebraska and half of Iowa) I closed the book after reading it. Upon reopening, I took a picture. I plan to read it to my therapist on Thursday. I hope y'all will read it now:

I love this advice that Dr. Meredith Grossman gives her patients: Do the opposite of what your anxiety is telling you to do. Your anxiety will always scream at you to run, hide, bail. So don't! If it's telling you to skip that networking event because you'll feel too awkward, go. If it's urging you to spend hours scrubbing down your apartment before your mother-in-law comes over, do a light cleanup and leave it at that. If it's telling you to avoid making a public gaffe at all costs, type gibberish on your Facebook page and post it. It's so liberating to see that, honestly, no one cares. And if they do, really, does it even matter?

That's it. That's the thing. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if you spend more than an hour laying in the grass after work for the sake of spending more time with a person you deeply appreciate. It doesn't matter if you leave letters on windshields or mail them without a return address. It doesn't matter if you pack up & fly across the country for a random vacation and have to find a second job to pay your bills the following months. It doesn't matter if nobody supports your plant-based lifestyle more than two years later. It doesn't matter if the book is never published. It doesn't matter what car you drive, place you live, or clothes you wear.

What matters is that we are alive. We should live. We should love. We should laugh.

I intend to do so much more.