Five years. Five joyous, devastating, crack me wide opening, expansive, difficult years. What a trip. There has been some weird shift in waking up and feeling your life. The full human depth of it. All of the grief. All of the successes, which we never spend enough time on. I swear I try, and yet all I can seemingly focus on is the loss. I recently heard someone say that the soul likes to dwell in the darkness. There cannot be a truer statement that speaks to my last five years.

I have grown in ways I never imagined. I have changed in ways I never thought I would. I feel so much bigger than I thought possible. My transformation is reflected in my image, now ever changing. I am done with holding on to a certain look, slowly and painfully embracing the seasons of surrender. Surrendering everything I thought I knew, or held dear.

Loss. Of my life. Of my freedoms. Of my friends. Of my dreams. Of my family. And back again. I feel like I am on a teeter-totter, back and forth with the strings of my heart. Pushing and pulling, shifting and growing. Rising and falling. Like the seasons, cyclical yet infinite.

I started writing this, and intended to put words down that were profound, deep, inspirational. Yet now I sit here, all used up. Tired. Which is exactly the state of things. It is exhausting some days to face yourself in the mirror. To make peace with your life, the decisions that got you here. That got you to this face you see, and that looks back at you. So to this exhaustion, where I still choose to go at it another day. To choose to continue to see the light, until I am able to let it consume me once again. For now, I’ll be here, in the darkness. For I am still in this cocoon, not quite yet ready to come out and be a butterfly.