Another false summit and that's perfect.

I have been thanked by powerful, gorgeous women that somehow resonate with my words on this blog. Some of these women have seen me so incredibly stripped down that I couldn’t even move from the foot of someone’s hospital bed. Or I sat in their living room reading aloud a break up letter and clinging to words that no longer belonged to me. Or I put on a power house face all day long and ran out of a yoga class to hug my best friend and she just knows.

All of my moments of desperation have an anxiety ridden thread in common and that is that I lost sight of my freedom. I promised myself before I even hit adolescence that I would never, ever hold on to someone so tight that their wings stopped functioning properly. So why, when I was 17 did I fear losing him to a higher power for years and years after. And why, when I was 21, did I squeeze his hand tight all the way to the Southernmost point until I was convinced that we could just marinate in the sand until we could both say forever. And why, when I’m 26, and I still learning to let go and give in at the same time.

Ahhhh it’s because we must continue to learn. When I nearly lost my first passionate, compulsive, musically inclined blue eyed boy in a crash, Mom said, “Chelsea, you can give him everything right now, but he does not owe you.” There is not a single person that we choose to love that owes us. When we learn to embrace the distance, when we learn to say run along my dear because you have amazing things to get done, when we come together and laugh over stories of our independent feats and realize there is no one else we would rather tell these stories too…that is when we really have it right.

Jealousy is the most ghastly feeling in the world and I haven’t felt it powerfully in years. Not because I stopped comparing or learned to trust completely…because I believe in my path and I believe in take it or leave it. I think 26 is a breaking point. I think 26 is about telling the truth and owning that truth and holding hands with someone that thinks that truth, although sometimes messy, is something that they’d be open to working with. It’s not about protecting your heart anymore…it’s about waiting for the right time to jump.

As Amy H would say, “crying is strength…until it’s not.” I’ll jump for that.