The Last Month and a Day

Tomorrow is a snow day, which is pretty much the best news a sophomore high school kid can imagine. I am sitting in my bed, wrapped in two extra blankets, listening to the Bon Iver radio station, drinking rooibos tea. I highly recommend that everyone do this at some point in their life. It's a lovely way to spend a Jack Frost sort of evening.

With the closing of my school's musical, 1776, I find myself with a plethora of extra minutes. No longer must I be Joseph Hewes, Continental Congress Delegate from North Carolina and deep-sea fishing rights advocate, after school. I have time to be Maya. While being Maya on this particular afternoon, it occurred to me that it's been exactly one month and a day since I've last written (for the blog, for pleasure, for grocery lists... the like). This particular light bulb of a thought got me thinking about what's happened in the last month and a day, and the answer is quite a bit. I feel like I've learned a considerable amount about myself in the last thirty-two-ish days, and I feel that, like our dear friend the Grinch, my heart has grown a couple of sizes.

Since October the 24th, I've been on depression medication pretty consistently; it's changed my life. I can't recall being depressed for one single day since my last psychiatry appointment. After dealing with depression and anxiety for four or so years, this is a pretty big deal for me. I am so, so grateful for my access to mental health services. I am grateful that the stigma surrounding medication is gradually (emphasis on gradually) dissolving. My loneliness problem has receded (not entirely, but slightly, and that's a promising start). My skin's clearing up. I am remembering to drink water.

All in all, life's feeling a lot easier to wake up to every morning. And for that, I'm delighted.

Things have not been perfect, naturally. Apparently, I suck at the listening portion of my Spanish exams, so my grade for that class is mildly infuriating. I went to my old friend's birthday party -- a pretty brave thing for the socially anxious wallflower I am -- and was explicitly told by someone I barely know that people think I'm weird and an outcast of a person. Not the best thing to be told when you are eager to make new friends and are new at school and were already thinking these things about yourself. Ah, well. Perhaps she was just nervous, too. No hard feelings here, but the rest of that party sure sucked.

The thing is, if the worst thing about my last month and a day was being told I'm weird by a random girl in my English class, I think I'm doing pretty well.

Another wonderful thing that's happened recently is the resurgence of my creativity. Imagination is a tricky thing, kind of like happiness - they flit in and out of lives, and one never quite knows how to nail them down. They're elusive and sporadic. They're pretty much Maria from the Sound of Music. But, for the time being, I feel like I've trapped both. I've been painting more, and drawing more, and playing piano more. I've been heavily involved in the theatre department at school, and singing again. I've had story ideas. I've started... reading. Books have been such a big part of my life since forever, but I lost a lot of my love for diving into fictional worlds in middle school. Guess my own little world was enough to deal with back then, or maybe I just didn't have time. No longer, my friends. Right now, I'm reading A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), The Glass Castle (Walls), and On Writing (King). It's fantastic, to say the least.

This year has been highly transformative for me, but the last month or two, especially so. I've forgotten who I am, and I've slowly started to recapture exactly who that is. They say these are the years of life where you discover what you want from life and who you hope to be. I have no clue what I want from life, but I know more than I did six months ago. I know what I am looking for in friends. I know what I value and what I am passionate about. I know my life will involve something with art and New York City. I don't know who I want to be, but I know that she will not emerge from spending days sequestered in her room, battling through depressive episodes. I know that snowy evenings are best spent with extra blankets, tea, and Bon Iver. Sometimes, it feels like I'm trying to capture a shadow under a tea cup. It keeps darting out of sight, and I can never fully catch it. But the important thing is that I can see it. I have an inkling of it. I have an inkling of myself.

Yesterday, my friend Adam asked me what has influenced who I am recently. I told him the novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. If you've been reading The Avocado and Me for awhile, this will come as no surprise to you, because I refuse to shut up about that book. Anyway. In it, a character named Willem separates his life into seasons:

"As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it's a vintage of wine, dividing years he's just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years."

I am well-aware that I've tied this quote into my posts before, but it's beautiful, and a perfect representation of what I try (and fail) to say half of the time. If I am one day as eloquent as Hanya Yanagihara, life will be bliss. Now, to place where I am in my life into a historical era, I think these would be the Discovery Years.

I am learning and unlearning. I am shedding skins and stepping into new ones. I cut my hair, I let it grow, I form opinions and chip away at old ones. I am becoming myself, and, quite frankly, I am excited.

Thanks for tuning in, everyone. I'll write again soon - I pinky promise, and my pinkies tend to be very truthful.

- Maya

Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash, Photo by Adam Navarro on Unsplash,
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash, Photo by James Lindsay on Unsplash