Life Changes

Revolutionary, I know. But if I have learned anything in the last year, it's that life changes. And that might seem evident, but it doesn’t happen in the obvious way you think it might. You plan your future and a pandemic hits. You wake up having never met all the friends you used to have. You graduate from college only to move back home. 

You’d think COVID-19 would have already defined change, the way it flipped our snow globe upside down, and still the fake specs of snow did not fall. It was a broken magic 8 ball that wouldn’t give you the response you needed no matter how hard you shook it. A trampoline placed under our feet, as we twirled and flipped to find the right way up. During that time, all I could do was hold my stomach down, hoping to keep it all in. I should mention I get motion sickness. (Somebody roll the windows down.)

To be honest, my life didn't start again until 2022. I mean, it didn’t stop, but I was on default mode. I got a job. I worked from home. I moved in with my parents. But not into the home where I grew up. A new one, 2,687 miles away. I have to be honest; there were some great moments. I tapped into my creativity again. I finally made a YouTube channel after years of only considering the idea. I started writing poetry more consistently. But pretty soon I started disliking the slow pace at which my real job was moving. I didn’t have many friends in the new town where I was living. Everything felt impossible. Everything felt tentative and somehow everlasting. 

I read a quote recently that said not to let your past decisions hold you hostage. You can leave, you can move, you can quit your job. And that’s what I did. I called New York City home again in late 2021, but the four walls of my apartment couldn’t replicate the vibrant city life I had been missing. Last May, when New York University held a graduation ceremony for the graduates of 2020 and 2021, it’s like I was given the okay, a green light on the highway, the ugly yellow thumbs up emoji, a confirmation that joy can be had, or better yet created after feeling its absence. I could finally move on. 

I have found myself in the exact same location. Ironic, isn't it? I’m back at NYU, but everything is different; the graduate classes I’m taking, the people I interact with, the world after a pandemic, and me. This twenty four year old who moved to New York at a blooming eighteen. I started a Master’s degree in Global Public Health last fall and I love it. For someone who dreaded the academic part of undergrad, I never thought I’d see myself enrolled in another program. But it felt right to pursue Environmental Health, and thankfully I was awarded a scholarship I couldn’t turn down. 

I feel like a different person. I feel older. I didn't know growing [up] was something you could feel. I thought it was something that just happens to you without realization. But I know it in every lunch I pack for myself, in every step through my commute, in every phone call to my family. 

I’ve learned that you can line up a top job after graduation, you can make a five year plan, and you can keep in touch with all your loved ones. But, and I say this in the gentlest way, it doesn’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, you should aim for growth in your life, but sometimes the world gets sick. It can’t get out of bed and won’t go into work. Your uncle passes and you realize you’ll have to live with the unexpected grief of people never coming back. 

Now, three years later, remembering a person’s life doesn’t feel so scary. It seems the more you grieve, eventually, the less it hurts. Going home feels like laying under a plush blanket. Spending moments with your family reminds you of all the times your jaw didn’t hurt from laughing. 

So when I decide to quit my job with nothing lined up, when people whose weddings I planned to attend some day kindly exit my life, when I open the door to fresh possibility and personas, I sit content in the movement that has happened to reach this moment. When the quicksand I thought was drowning me turns to a children’s sandbox, I am grateful for the way the wind blows, bringing me to people I never thought I’d meet and places I only dreamed I’d ever be. 

I suppose that’s the beauty of life—it goes on, it changes, and always for the better. I say always loosely, as a placeholder if you will. Because trust me, in the moments of turbulence, all we want is to be back on the ground. But better comes in the soaring, watching the lego cars you pass while fear attempts to eat you alive. Better always comes in hindsight, reflecting on the best days of your worst years, counting all the tears that needed to fall, as you swing in your hammock waiting for whatever is coming next.