Last night I crawled into bed and crumpled into a pile of grief. Grief because I’m hundreds of miles from home and family in a new place surrounded by strangers, because the boy I love is 1,500 miles away, and because some days it seems as though there isn't any point to trying.
All the infuriatingly stereotypical questions and self-doubts of a new college student race in circles around my head, and they’ve disoriented me. Despite my confident demeanour in my scripted day-to-day conversations—apparently double-majoring in math and literature indicates having your life together—I am anything but confident. I am watching fellow freshmen around me, who seem to be cashing in on the promise of college being the best time of their lives, but I have no stomach for it.
This morning, after a fitful night of sleep, I got up, actually ate breakfast, and went to my calculus class as a willing learner. I laughed at my religion professor's jokes, and I enjoyed my philosophy class. Grief sat with me as I struggled and floundered through today, but it wasn't the empty miasma I had thought about during the night. In the words of Ellen Bass: "To love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it...you think, how can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.”
We are born with the will to live, but loving life is something that we must learn. Loving life is not an easy thing for me, but every morning I need to embrace life and love it again. Life is rarely charming, often hard and endlessly full of questions. Frankly, it's a daunting and exhausting mess. But it's beautiful, too. Even if there is only one good and lovely thing in a hundred senseless and ugly things, we have to hold onto that. Being courageous about life—loving life—does not always roar. Sometimes it is the small voice at the end of the day that says, "I will try again." And we get up again and we keep moving—but first, we have to lift our eyes up from the ground to see where we're going.
Life is a linear thing, and even though we frequently get side-tracked and stuck in loops, we manage to meander back to the forwards path. So we beat on, boats against the current, but we are not borne back ceaselessly into the past.
