Becoming A Barter Player

Today marks the start of a new chapter, a fresh dive into the unknown, marked by little to no expectations and innumerable curiosities. My bags are packed, my car stuffed to overflowing with the things that will make a life and I couldn’t be more excited. Or nervous? Maybe they’re the same thing. 

I’ve been waiting over a calendar year for this moment, the jumping off point from the closure of college as I trust fall into the working world. Pandemics have a way of redefining that point. Blurring it. For a year and a half, I’ve tried my best to pretend that I haven’t been swaying on the edge of a cliffside. Or waiting for that phone call. But I have been. I’ve been teetering on the tip of what feels like my life for a full rotation around the sun and I’m ready to surrender to the fall. Peering over the precipice is exhilarating for a while, but eventually you exhaust the imagination and stop wondering what lies below. You start looking behind you, or up to the skies for another way forward…or inward. And those journeys begin to entice you more than the cliff dive you spent twenty two years gathering up the courage for because at least you don’t have to pretend not to wait anymore. At least you can exhale and live. 

Today, the waiting ends. The action begins. I thought this day might never come. It feels different than I somehow know it would’ve felt before all of this worldwide transformation, but that’s not a negative observation. If anything, the moment is richer, more layered, more nuanced now because I have a clearer view. If I’m balanced upon the same point I was before, I at least have better lenses. 

The past year gifted me more than I could’ve dreamed. It’s not enough to say that I have learned lessons, I have become a student of life. It doesn’t suffice to verbalize my values, because today, I live and breathe them. Or at the very least, I embody them more than I ever have before. And it certainly not comprehensive to say that I have made memories, built bonds, cultivated communities, but those words will have to suffice because they are not enough verbs in the English language to encapsulate the way my connections and their trails of light have made me feel. For now, all I can be is grateful. So grateful I will be.