I have been trying to read a larger variety of articles on substack recently.
One theme I have noticed among a lot of the content I peruse is this big, meaningful theme of ‘life is an adventure.’
‘Living big.’
Usually accompanied by an empowering narrative accented with travel pictures, nature hikes, good food, etc etc.
Good content, of course, well written. I’m not shitting on it.
I have been thinking about how I used to see content like this and feel like I should be doing things like that, my life felt lackluster in comparison. When I was doing things like that, I felt like I should probably be doing more.
I don’t feel like that anymore.
Reading them now, I realize that my life is probably one people might see and say, ‘I wish I could do that.’
To be quite frank, it’s a pretty stereotypical ‘over thirty, no kids, passive income’ lifestyle. It’s not unique. Just scroll substack and you’ll find tons just like it.
But I’m sure if I compiled a highlight reel of it all, it could be described by some as ‘living the dream.’ I’ve probably described it that way. It totally can be.
It just didn’t feel that way to live it for a long time.
A lot of advice I have been given over the past year was along the lines of being grateful and appreciating the life I have now and all of the opportunities that come with it. I give this advice to myself too. And I am. And it does help.
‘Look at how great your life is, look at how far you’ve come!’
The roadblock I kept running into was, ‘But you don’t understand, I would give it all up. I would give up every single part of it to go back in time, to go back to that ultrasound and hear a heartbeat when there wasn’t one.’
This wasn’t the adventure I wanted. I wanted a mundane life. I wanted my partner to be as good as he was on paper. I wanted our baby. I wanted to live in our house in the country and to be surrounded by all these people I had met that I felt truly cared about me.
That was my dream life. This one has often felt like someone else’s.
There’s a lot of different ways to live big.
I have been working on a lot of different things recently. One is a product that I have named, ‘The Futile.’
It’s called this because one: it’s based on the recent time period of my life that I wanted to die almost every moment of every day so it’s hilarious to me that it’s named after a song about eating rat poison for dinner.
Two: It was the original idea which I spent months and months trying to create just for there to end up being literally the simplest solution which was also the very last thing I tried.
And three: because I spent this time period, the first half of my time here, doing everything big and beautiful and I felt almost nothing at all. It was futile.
I would hike all the way up a mountain, get to the top and stand there looking out at a view that was awe strikingly beautiful and I would feel proud of myself, sure. I would admire it. I would acknowledge how lucky I was to be able to be there.
But I would feel so, so achingly empty. I’d sit there for a while, thinking and feeling nothing at all, and then I would make my way back down.
Sometimes I think my nervous system is so skittish that it just slams the ‘emergency shut down’ button when I start to feel some inkling of joy. There’s probably a lot of truth to that, to be honest.
It had to give me some sort of dopamine though because I would go back out and do it again. I think I also kind of liked the ‘feeling and thinking nothing at all’ part of it. I do actually remember these moments more fondly than I felt at the time.
I was trying to live big. And I’m sure it all looked and sounded great. And at least I was trying.
But it wasn’t the way I thought I should have, could have had or would have.
Now that I am a little farther into my ‘adventure’ here, I do feel emotions in these ‘big moments.’ But they aren’t any bigger than when I have felt them in so many small ones.
There are so many moments in my life I didn’t think were big at the time.
Sitting in the back room of my old job, laughing with my best friend. Talking about our days, complaining about insignificant things. Even just existing and knowing she was there. There was a level of comfort and safety in that I haven’t felt since.
That was living big.
Looking at the face of someone I loved so much and thinking it was one of the wonders of the world.
I’ve seen some of the wonders of the world. It’s not the same.
That was living big.
Now, before I go to bed, I set up my coffee maker to start brewing at 3:33 am so it’s ready when I wake up a little after four. I fall asleep feeling sparkly as I think about how much I am looking forward to my first cup of coffee in that really quiet moment right before the sunrise.
I wanted to look forward to waking up again. Now I do.
It might not sound like much but it sure does feel like living big.
Living big isn’t about all these wild, picture perfect moments.
And I know I say that as someone with a lot of free time and not a lot of responsibilities so I get to do ‘wild’ things a little more than some.
And sure, they make great stories and great pictures. I do like looking back at them.
But it’s the pictures of mundane every day moments that I look back at more, the ones I wouldn’t remember otherwise.
It brings me back to all of those old family videos I watched recently.
None of them are ‘big’ moments. They are all very small, insignificant moments in time captured by my grandpa with a video camera everyone continuously expresses distaste for.
Now, everyone is grateful he annoyed them all with the video camera.
Because they are big moments. They are the story, they are the history.
They are the moments we might not remember but the ones we would give anything to go back to.
They’re proof we were all here. They’re proof we all lived our lives together. They are proof we lived big.
I still skipped a lot of the parts with just myself in them because it made me deeply uncomfortable.
Family can be a mirror to see yourself in. They do shape your worldview, for better or worse.
My family isn’t as close as it once was. Some aren’t here anymore, some have drifted apart. It seems like every loss fractures a part of that mirror until what is left doesn’t make a full picture anymore. Your reflection is distorted.
It’s easy to get caught up in what could have, should have or would have been in life.
It’s easy to get lost and drown in wanting so badly to be able to go back and change it or even just to have the chance to back and live it all again.
It’s hard to keep looking in that mirror, to keep not recognizing yourself, until you find one day that you’ve only managed to shatter it into smaller and smaller pieces.
It’s hard to think that the life I am living in this moment, this exact present moment, is probably someone else’s dream life. I am ungrateful.
It’s hard not to argue that, due to what led me here, my life should not be anyone’s dream life and that this hypothetical person is actually living my dream life because that is was what I wanted instead.
I am a brat. And a loony.
I yelled at my brain for long enough to shut the fuck up, to get off its miserable hamster wheel and enjoy this god damn moment for so long that it finally did. It shut the fuck up and then I could take a look around at my actual life and say ‘you know what, this is actually just fucking fine!’
It turns out, I actually did get a mundane life. It’s not blowing up every few months like it did for the past five million years. And I finally realized I should be throwing a fucking party instead of a fucking fit about it!
I should throw a party that I finally don’t feel like eating rat poison for dinner. It isn’t futile.
I realized recently that I don’t have to keep trying to make sense of my reflection in the shards of glass from an old broken mirror. Some of those pieces weren’t even the ones I started with. They weren’t inherited. They were slipped in, disguised as a missing piece.
There’s something about a brand new mirror.
The more I could zoom out, the more clarity I had, the more I could see that it wasn’t all about losing my partner and the baby. It was the main plot, of course. But it wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t the only reason why it all hurt so badly.
It was also about having somewhere I felt like I could belong. It was becoming a part of a family that wasn’t my own. A family that felt right when mine hadn’t for so long.
Broken glass is weathered over time, the edges of old glass aren’t as sharp. New glass is.
For once I didn’t feel like I was on the outside looking in.
When my partner lost his mind and when I lost the baby, I was treated like a monster.
When I look at these pieces of new glass among the old, I realize they are cheap. Fun house glass, a little tricky. Meant to skew perception and deceive the mind.
There is a second wheel my brain will find itself on. It’s a wheel that says, ‘he was perfect, it was all your fault, you were the problem, you were why he lost his mind.’
It’s harder to yell at your brain to shut the fuck up when it’s playing a recording of a voice that’s not your own.
I would have never belonged there.
I paid movers to move me out of the house in the country the day after my surgery. I had no other choice. When they left, I stood in the center of a house in the city I never wanted to live in again and I stared at all of the boxes in a daze. Eventually, I made my bed, laid on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling instead.
I was alone. And I felt even more so.
That week, while I was recovering, my best friend tried to visit me multiple times. My best friend. The one that I had spent countless hours with at work, the one that I had always felt the safest with.
I turned her down every time.
But why?
How had these things I had just experienced have the power to fracture my self image so irreparably? How did these people who were not my family, who had not even been in my life for that long, erode my self worth and sense of safety so far down?
How had I quickly become so scared of being vulnerable that I couldn’t even allow my best friend to comfort me in the worst moments of my life?
I don’t know. I regret it.
I have shut out almost every single person in my life since.
I hate to admit that I do not trust people. I struggle to feel attached to anyone.
It does not feel safe.
A few month ago, I was invited to go rock climbing. It was something I really wanted to do and I had been invited a few times so I finally accepted.
Rock climbing is easy. I am not afraid of climbing up high or falling off the wall because I don’t really care if I do.
I had wanted to rock climb so I did. I had a feeling I would be good at it. I don’t know why.
Soon after I started, I was invited to be a part of a climbing group.
I did not want to do that. It sounded terrifying and I did not think I would be good at it.
I know why.
But I did it anyway. I cried all the way home one of the first times I went but I still went.
And then I kept going.
People always talk about the trust that you build in people as you take turns belaying each other.
I put a lot of focus on learning how to belay when I started. I never, ever want to drop someone. It makes me sick to think about it. I want people to trust me to take care of them, to keep them on the wall.
It makes me laugh because I don’t really think about my trust in the person belaying me. I assume they know what they are doing. If they don’t and they drop me, fuckin’ oh well. Nothing new to me.
My past experiences with a sense of ‘family’ had chipped away at me for so long and so deeply that I was terrified of being a part of something as small as a rock climbing group. That I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in this group dropped me, I almost expected it.
But I did join the group. And no one has dropped me yet.
I may not need to trust someone that can keep me on the wall.
But I did I need to trust that someone wanted to.
I think I can be good at making friends, even if it wasn’t easy to start.
That’s living big.
I avoided a certain mountain here for a whole year. The one my old partner, the one who was perfect on paper, wanted to show me. I didn’t want to go alone.
But I didn’t. I went with my friend, the same one who invited me to go rock climbing. I thought of him more as a mentor then because I didn’t think a seventy five year old man would really want to be my friend.
I thought he was just being nice since I was obviously lonely and borderline haunting the desert like a spooky ghost.
I didn’t go up that mountain alone and I think having even just one good friend can make an already beautiful view feel so much more alive.
That’s living big.
Over the past couple weeks, I used a pair of tongs to slowly fill an entire bucket full of prickly pear fruit from my yard.
Six jars of jelly in my cabinet shows me that there really was fruit underneath all those spines. My friend and I boiled it down, stirred in some sugar and turned it into something completely different.
Sweet, even. No spines to be found.
That’s living big.
I took a break from writing this for a moment to fold some laundry and a painting on my wall caught my eye. It was given to me not long after I moved by the woman who owns the property I live on. It’s a prickly pear cactus and it’s technically on loan because a member of her family painted it.
But she loaned it to me. It’s in a pink frame because she noticed I liked pink. There is a rattlesnake skin shed draped over the top of it. She found it and left it for me because she ‘knew I liked things like that.’ She only found it because she was trying to find out how the aforementioned snake was continuing to get into my yard. Turns out, it lived under my house.
The snake came back this year. I didn’t mind when it popped its little head out from under my tomatoes. I apologized for getting it wet and I went inside as it slithered towards me. When I let her know it was back, she came over in her snake boots, literally ready to send guns blazing.
No shots were fired and later that night, I saw the snake slither out of my watering can and make its way out. No harm done.
Even the rattlesnake gets to live big.
I appreciate that someone came over guns blazing. I appreciate how much she’s taken care of me. I need to make sure I give her a jar of jelly.
I guess you can be the prickliest little pear on the cactus but there’s always going to be someone who knows you just need a pair of tongs. And there’s always going to be someone who knows how to turn it into something that pairs well with something else.
The right people will make you realize it might be worth it to take a cactus and make jelly.
It was. I love peanut butter and jelly.
And I love a desert metaphor even if it’s not my most poetic.
I think experiencing every day life with the right people can be what makes life feel big.
I don’t want the life I thought I did.
I want this one, this one feels right.
This one feels like living big.
This one feels like mine.
