Where patience has gotten me thus far…
Life has a funny way of throwing us the hardest of curve balls when we want to listen the least. We are given opportunities to listen, learn, and grow, and sometimes we simply refuse to do as such. For me, life threw me the greatest curveball and challenging years of my life.
In September of 2021, the last employee of my parent’s family business left to deal with personal issues that had arisen due to covid-19. After having just completed college, quit a job that I loved, and moved into an apartment with my sister in a hole new city — not but three months earlier — I had no choice but to come home in order to help keep that business on it’s feet.
That return to my home town, turned into continuing to pay rent in another state, working for my family again, and living home again after nearly four years of my own independence. Needless to say, the toll that section from 2021 to 2023 took a huge hit on me mentally and emotionally.
Unfortunately, the hits kept coming with independent personal issues, a long distance relationship, and a few family deaths that rocked our little unit. That nearly three year period was filled with so much grief and longing for independence, that I had no where to keep my thoughts straight.
In what is now 2025, I can see through a much clearer head, that what now feels like an overnight change, was actually consistent and clear growth of me as a person during those three years that have lead me to where I am today.
From a college graduate renting a room with her younger sister, applying for any job I could ask for and desperate to make “writing” my career, to now living with my partner, in a house we own, growing two businesses with ideas for more, I couldn’t have asked to be placed anywhere else.
I think we often forget that life will give you the hard stuff to teach us lessons, and force us to grow; smacking us in the face with shitty situation after shitty situation until we are forced to submit to ourselves. For me, I learned to take the swings in life and even hope to see them come faster and faster in order to tackle them head on. Patience was given to me through these trial and tribulations, but I earned my peace with the taming of my emotions and mind. I can’t imagine my life as anything but that: peaceful. I will have my weak moments in the future; moments when I refusee4 to listen, but I look forward to those tiny, quiet moments where I can compare the past to the present and weep at the peace I’ve built around myself and in my life.
To that future me, I can’t wait to meet you.
