Five Words

Vacations are lovely things. They are a perfect time to do nothing or everything, just as you please, to eat all the things or skip all the meals, to read a stack of books or gaze blankly into space, to catch up with friends or ignore texts sent by obnoxious creeps, to be alone or go to all the parties, or to gaze at your navel or expose it to the sun as you drink a margarita by the pool. They are a perfect time to run away and escape on your 37th birthday when you don't want to do anything but you don't want to do nothing, either.

I plan to do all of those things in the next few days, but for the moment, I am content to lay in bed and do not much of anything. In this moment, that entails catching up with Eldest's formidable body of online literary works. But alack! Almost as soon as I started reading, I stumbled across a phrase that just stuck with me. It's blunt and yet a little harsh, like I am, and it's succinct, which I most decidedly am not, and I love it to bits. 

Living your own goddamn story. 

It's a little like the statement "living your life on your own terms" but a little bit more bold, a little more uncompromising. Both of which I need to be more of in my life. 

It's hard to do, sometimes, especially when your story gets caught up in someone else's. It's hard to do when other people don't seem to like your story. It's hard to do when the plot hits lulls or snags. It's hard to do when you're not quite sure the story is going the way you want. 

Living your own goddamn story. 

Living purposefully, deliberately, proudly. Making conscious choices, being proactive rather than reactive. Walking away when shit gets fucked up (I've gotten good at that.) Actually, no, not just walking away--walking away with that purposeful stride that somehow makes my entire body bounce and jiggle. (And then owning that I have a stride that does that.) I guess it's owning all the parts of the story, and choosing how I tell it. 

I can't choose the ending of the story--the when or how or inevitability of death, but I can choose how to get to that end. I can't choose the incidental events or the minor bit players, but I can choose the characters and the major plotlines and the setting and the moods and the themes. 

Living your own goddamn story. Here's to me learning more, day by day, how to do that. Here's to me perfecting the art of choosing the right characters, and to actively knowing where and how I want things to go, and owning the mistakes and triumphs. Here's to my 37th year on this chaotic, fragile rock, and to making it uniquely mine.