Tag Archives: Change

The Things That Change And The Things That Don’t

Posted in Family, Life Ramblings, Relationships by

I wish I was starting this post with some major announcement that my path in life had been found and verified, and I was in the process of embarking on some great adventure… but alas, just more waiting.  Waiting for everything to change.

However, we did get three days at my parents, with amazing home cooked meals we didn’t have to plan, and my little sister and I celebrated our birthdays together again, like we always did as kids.  The cake? Disney Princess.  We do not believe in getting too old to celebrate in tiaras either.  In fact, not much has changed in 15 years… We’ve just upgraded the lemonade.

 

Yup, that is what we did on Saturday afternoon.  We went to lunch, we went to the local ice cream parlor, and then we came back and pulled out the bucket of sidewalk chalk my mom recently discovered when she was cleaning out the garage.  She was going to give it to the neighbor kids… It was a good thing she didn’t.  She would have missed out on our very impressive artwork.

“Of course your castle is all pretty and perfect, and mine is huge, pink and crazy with an alligator and a waterside,” my sister complained as we sipped our drinks and documented our undertaking with instagram.  Some things never change.

But truthfully a lot has changed… and in another 15 years,even more will have changed.  I can’t even imagine what our lives will look like then.  And yet, I can still see us on the driveway playing with sidewalk chalk.  Somehow, that’s incredibly comforting right now.

 

 

The Graduation Restoration: Person Under Construction

Posted in Life Ramblings by

It finally feels like the end.

For the last few months I’ve been counting down the days, praying that some number would trigger the feeling that the end was near, and really it had been doing the opposite.  100 more days felt like a lifetime.  80 felt worse, because the 20 between 100 and 80 had seemed to last forever.  But we came back from our weekend away and it hit me the moment I walked in the door.  Law school is almost over.

We’re still 37 days out from graduation, but that number feels much smaller when I look at my calendar.  I’m going to finish out the week, spend most of next week in DC, and then have one week left when I’m back.  Then finals… and to be honest, when you’ve made it to the end, two self scheduled finals seem pretty insignificant.  Then lots of banquets and dinners and parties… and then it’s all over.  It feels simultaneously like it’s been forever, and like we just started yesterday.

I could expound on that anomaly, and I’m sure I will later, but I think the reality is this: I haven’t felt like myself this whole time.  There’s this weird image in my mind of me walking into law school, blonde and pink and happy, and then slowly this other person taking over who I don’t even recognize.  She’s darker, more cynical, perpetually annoyed and chronically tearful.  Even I can’t stand her, but none of my many efforts to fight her off worked.  I see the real me waiting at the end, like somehow, when it’s over, I magically get to be ME again. But can it really be that easy?

I want it to be.  I’ve even considered uprooting us and trying to put my life back to the way it was, just to expedite the process. But really, I know that doesn’t work.  We could move back to the city I left but still have an abnormal crush on, but I wouldn’t suddenly be in college again, or in my time off after college.  I wouldn’t be single and content to live on a shoestring budget.  My friends aren’t all still there, and the ones that are I haven’t seen in ages.  Three years changes a lot, and the rest of the world wasn’t in this law school bubble with me.  It kept right on going.

But even though I can’t go back, I want HER back.  A married, older version of her is fine, but this dark, twisted version isn’t.  Maybe she is just magically waiting at the end of the gradation stage.  Diploma, handshake, POOF: old me.  But in case she isn’t, I’ve decided to develop a plan.  The Graduation Restoration.

Restoration: the return of something to a former, original, normal or unimpaired condition.

That’s all I want.  Not so much to ask for.

Taking the advice from Ben Franklin and Gretchen Rubin, I’ve decided this requires blueprints.  A real, honest assessment of what needs to go, what needs to come back, and how I’m going to make that happen.  If I have no idea what the future holds right now, I can’t leave it to chance.  I need to figure out how to get back to being a person I liked, before whatever is coming actually gets here.

And so, I’m starting with the easiest thing, a symbol that I’ve returned: I’m going back to blonde.  I had platinum blonde hair when I started law school (and pink glasses… I was trying to play up the legally blonde angle to convince myself it would be a fun adventure.)  But three months in it felt all wrong, and I took it dark brown.  It’s been that way ever since.  It’s time to lighten up, physically and mentally.

Now on to the tough stuff…

Maybe It Would Be Easier If We All Lived Just Across The Hall

Posted in Friendship, Life Ramblings, Relationships by

One of my girlfriends came over for dinner this last weekend, something that hasn’t happened in a while.  We’re both busy, schedules are crazy, I’m married… there’s a million bad excuses.  But it finally happened, and soon after dinner my husband went back to sleep (the meds they gave him after the accident were still knocking him out.), so we got some time for girl talk.

She asked me if I believe you can go through a quarter life crisis.  How had we never had this conversation before if we’re such good friends?  That’s a really good question.  But we started to vent.  About law school.  Mostly about the people at school.  The bubble of high-school repeating itself that we will never miss, and the people we will.  And then we got to the interesting part, the people who’ve already slipped away.  This part, I’ve been thinking about all week.

Friends come and go.  It’s just a fact of life for most people.  And some friendships, usually the long lasting ones, ebb and flow.  I can go months without talking to my best friend and then call and tell her everything, we just pick it up where we left off.  We talked about how you can’t really have long lasting friendships if you need constant validation you’re still friends.  It doesn’t work, life happens.

We also talked about what I know is one of her biggest annoyances, the girl that ditches her friends for a guy.  To some extent, it always happens.  I know I did it (she’d agree), and in retrospect, I wish I’d done it less.  You get caught up in things, and there’s only so much time.  When you’re free time was already strained being divided between x number of friends, x+1 is going to mean less time for everyone else. And even if you say you’re not going to, you do.  But people do it to varying degrees.  And even if you’ve done it yourself, when someone else is doing it, you want them to be better than that.

I realize now that I didn’t really know how to move in together or get married.  None of my close friends had done it.  I still struggle with trying to figure out what the right balance is and what that looks like when so many of my friends are single.  And that’s only amplified by the fact that I already have no free time.  And by the fact that I met my husband and got engaged so quickly after I moved here and started law school.  I didn’t have roots here.  I had this girlfriend, who I met when I started school, and a few friends in other parts of the cities that didn’t understand why law school was taking over my life.  And then I met this guy… The norm I had found for about three months here was already disrupted.

I don’t really like thinking in terms of regrets, because if you changed how I got to this place in time, you’d change me.  But there are things that I would do differently if I could do them over.  And one of them is how I handle friendships.  Sometimes it’s not even what happened, but what wasn’t said while it was happening.  Maybe I could have tried harder to find more time.  Maybe she could have too.  Either way, I know we could have tried harder to have a straight up conversation about what was going on, what was taking up our time, how a guy was changing things, how new friends were changing things.

I almost wrote off our friendship at one point.  But the thing is, I think we both had the same frustration to an opposite problem.  I couldn’t not be in a relationship to make our friendship easier, just as she wasn’t going to magically be in one.  And if she was only friends with me, it would be natural to still see me in the same setting she saw me alone in.  But my husband was in that group of friends too.  I’m sure it seemed like we were never apart at all.  And when two of our other close friends coupled up… even worse.  I wouldn’t have wanted to be the extra wheel either, but suddenly that meant that the same group that would have hung out all together a year before was uncomfortable now.

For our first year of law school, we were in sections.  We had all of our classes together.  We sat in the same seats. We studied together, and we took exams together.  And then that ends, and you go your own ways and everyone is doing different things and are on different pages… Life is easier when you’re going through everything together.  You have support.  You have understanding.  And you’re all facing up to the same craziness, so no one is left out.  Sometimes I wish life happened in shifts like this.  A whole group of friends met their husbands together, got married together, had kids together… navigating friendships would be so much easier.

I know you don’t have to be going through the same thing to be friends.  But it does give you one more thing to base your friendship on.  I have friends who I was so close to when we were at the same place in our lives, and now it’s a struggle to find things to talk about or do together, because our lives look so different.  And then I have friends who’s lives have never been at the same place as mine, but we had different bases for our friendship: activities, or memories or values or something.  But marriage doesn’t just change what you do when you’re not with friends, it changes how you do friends.

There was a time before I started dating my husband, where I talked to this friend a few times a day.  She was my default person.  I wanted to go see a movie, I usually asked her first.  I felt like going out to grab dinner, I called her up.  Before I knew her, there were other people who had that role at different stages of my life.  And certain people who were defaults for different things.  And that changes with marriage.  Husbands naturally become your default person for most things.  I think they have to… that’s the point. Plus they’re right there.  If mine is sitting on the couch asking what’s for dinner, my first thought isn’t to wonder if someone else would want to grab a pizza.  So even when you do put in effort, it doesn’t amount to the same thing it was before.

Is there a secret to doing the right?  Something I didn’t discover and should have?  Or is change just hard and part of this stage of our lives?  Does it get easier as more of your friends end up with built-in default people too?