A[live]ing

Often I sit by myself and I start to think. Perhaps maybe too much. Funny thing is, often I find myself sitting in a room dying laughing by myself. Sometimes I’ll even be walking down the road and just start busting out laughing. You know why? I’m laughing because I am happy. Sounds kind of sad, but I am literally laughing because I find myself with a huge as grin on my face. Then I’m like what the heck am I so happy about? It’s then that I realize, that it is simply because I am happy.

It’s amazing the things that happen to you when you start to understand who you are, what makes you happy, and what you believe in. I’ve never felt like I wasn’t happy or that I was keeping myself from happiness, but I guess I had never really experienced what it is like to love yourself. Loving yourself isn’t about doing the thing that makes you happy and seems acceptable to others. Loving yourself isn’t holding back from doing the thing you want to do because it is different than your friends. Loving yourself is doing everything you want to do because you want to do it. It doesn’t mean that sometimes you might feel uncomfortable at first at what people might think or say. It doesn’t mean that loving yourself is always easy. It just means that you are willing to put yourself in those situations because you know the end result is much greater than the original discomfort.

I feel like I always had an idea of who I was, but I never really publicized it. I never owned it. I didn’t want to fit in. I wanted to talk to the people who didn’t talk to everybody. I wanted to wear my clothes two sizes too big for me and not match them. I wanted to be different. Many of these things I did, but people still didn’t really know who I was besides the fact that I was an athlete.

The transition that happens when you have been identified and categorized in a box for a solid ten years of your life and then it all changes, isn't exactly easy. You feel like you lose your identity. Not because you changed, but because people no longer categorize you. You’re no longer known as a student-athlete. You are just known as a human. Maybe this change was a bit more drastic for me because not only had my athletic career ended, but I also moved half way across the world to an entirely different country. No one knew who I was, what I had done, what I was capable of. I was just a new face on their land.

At first it was hard besides the initial excitement. No one knows you, no one really cares to know you, you don’t have any friends, and now you don’t have sports. Not only are you worried about getting a bank account, getting a phone set up, finding a job because you don’t have any money, relationships, staying in contact with family, earthquakes, and everything else that life decides to throw at you, you always tend to find taking care of yourself at the bottom (or at least I did).

It wasn’t until a few months ago that I was forced to sit alone and think about who I was, what made me happy, why I get up every morning. I realized that I hadn’t done anything for myself. Everything I did was because someone else had asked me if I wanted to do something or I was finding myself in a routine of going to work, going to the gym, going home, and going to sleep. It is not necessarily a bad or unhealthy routine and I wouldn’t say that I was unhappy, but I also wouldn’t say I was happy.

I went to work because I had to make money not because I enjoyed it. I went to the gym because I felt like that was what being healthy meant and I had a vision in my head of what my body should look like based off of photo shopped images I had seen online not because it made my body feel good (in fact it hurt). I went home because I didn’t have friends and didn’t understand what it meant to go into town, outside, or anywhere by yourself and just take in reality. I went to sleep, well, let’s be honest, I wanted to go to sleep!

Why did I live in this routine of doing things that I actually didn’t want to do or care about? Why wake up every day knowing that you are going to do exactly what you did the day before? How is that fun? How is that living? Theoretically, how was I any different than a robot? My feelings and emotions clearly didn’t exist and if they did they didn’t matter. I did all of this because I wasn’t thinking for myself, I was letting the world think for me. I let the world tell me what to do.

Since then, I have changed jobs, none of my days are the same, I don’t have a gym membership, my workout routine is completely different than it ever has been, I enjoy the workouts I do, I definitely still sleep, but most importantly I think for myself.

When I find myself sitting in an empty room or on the sidewalk smiling to myself, I smile because I know I have beat the system. I smile because I know that I am doing what I want, not because of what or who society is telling me to be. I smile because I am happy.

Some days are hard and sometimes I still wonder what I am doing with my life, but then I remember I am living.