The last couple of weeks prior to winter break, I discovered Maggie Rogers.
I listed to her compositions non stop while working on my finals. I played it while I was on the plane home where I was comforted with the warmth of familiarity and felt like I could finally breathe after experiencing the craziest months of my life. Winter had already settled in with thick blankets of snow and dusty white patches staining the tar. The trees had handfuls of snow draped on their branches along with some lingering Christmas lights to ease the long nights.
It was quiet, the same as I remembered it in the summer and during my brief weekend visit in November. It was home.
I spent several evenings driving down the silent back roads blasting "Now That The Light Is Fading" through the speakers, going anywhere and everywhere under the supervision of the moon. I danced about my room in the bath of warm orange light casted through my window by the rising sun to "Fallingwater" and "Dog Years", and hummed the lyrics of "Alaska" while cleaning and gutting my room of old memories and belongings I no longer felt joy in.
Maggie's music helped me heal and come to understand everything about myself and my life that was jumbled up and scattered about. It encouraged me to begin again, and so I did. I gutted my room, got rid of everything that wasn't something I cherished or continued to bring me happiness. I only wanted to keep what inspired me.
I wanted to begin again.
Every aspect of my life was challenged when I left for college in New York. How I saw myself in the mirror of the bathroom I share with my little sister who had grown up while I was gone, was different. My thoughts were different too. I was quieter in the bedroom I had been vibrant and loud in last summer. I had changed.
With each day I was learning to be okay with it, to make peace with this new self and life I had yet to take time to understand. I wasn't prepared to change so much when I left in September—I didn't think I would, oddly enough. In all honesty, I thought everything would be the same, only I would be in New York.
Looking back on all of it now, I'm grateful for everything that I experienced last semester as disorienting as it was. There's a beauty in change, in letting yourself be almost like a river, constantly flowing and changing with the way the wind blows, and overall, simply embracing where life takes you.
It was important for me to spend a lot of time by myself when I returned home for break. Everything that happened during my first semester was overwhelming and left me dazed and greatly distanced from myself. All I had known about myself was challenged.
I wrote a lot, some poetry and others personal essays or single sentences. I painted a lot, took several long walks alone, though some were accompanied with my dog who is a great companion to talk to, to go detangle the knotted mess of my thoughts. I let myself dance or flow around my room in silence or with music. I let myself be.
I did all of this to make sense of everything that had happened; to forgive myself, to accept the change and embrace it. I wanted to learn how to be. I want to become like a river, constantly flowing and living in the present, and part of getting to that was letting go of my expectations and the desire to try to control everything.
I fought against change for so long, too caught up in who I had been only month ago and how I wanted everything to be that didn't leave room for living. Being home, surrounded by the comfort of familiarity and having the time to be silent and get to know myself, allowed me to realize I didn't have any obligations to be someone other than who I was now. And even then, I don't have to know.
I'm not who I was six months ago. I've gone through the biggest change in my life so far and I have learned a lot from it. I realized I am a perfectionist and with that I have learned to silence my desire to be in control of everything, learning to simply trust that everything will work out in the end and be.
We can't control everything. We're here to live, to experience life, go on adventures, create, etc. We're supposed to make mistakes. We are supposed to change, to build from our previous self and improve from the lessons we have learned and the years we have lived. And with all of this, we are being.
There's so much beauty in my home that I had never noticed before until I returned from my first semester of college. I didn't realize how much I love the slower pace of life and the quiet. The endless backroads weaving through woods and the vibrant sunrise amidst the fog of an early morning and the sunset too. For the first time, I fully understood the saying "you don't know what you love until it is gone", and it's not that what I love of my home is gone, but rather for the first time in a long time, I found comfort in it's barren streets, the lack of speed and noise, and simplicity of life there.
New York is much different, and of course, it's unique in its own way. The city has found a comfortable spot in my heart for its liveliness and promotion of creativity and abundant possibilities, and as I since returning home, I've embraced it while cherishing my love for a slower pace of life and being in silence. I sealed some of the peace and simplicity from home and took it back with me as a part of my being.
My range of playing music has expanded since being back but has largely rotated around Maggie Roger's first album, Heard It In A Past Life. If you're going through some times of change, I cannot recommend her music enough. Her lyrics speak volumes.
We only have so many years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc., to live. Enjoy where you are right now. As it passes it'll become a part of the past, a moment you can't get back and a moment you will only live once in this particular way and time, so embrace it and make the most out of it.
My advice: think less, live more.
Until next time,
take care,
Rachel xoxo
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