When does love happen?

Is love the result of the first night spent in the same bed? Or maybe that night is a result of the love. Perhaps it happens the first time you meet their parents – maybe you fall in love with them first, sort of as a prerequisite to falling in love with the one you’re really with.

I guess one could argue that it happens all at once, in one moment. That maybe you go to bed after a night of binge watching Doctor Who and wake up the next morning completely overwhelmed with this feeling. And there was no exchange of words or sex or cupcakes to explain this sudden, extreme change of heart. Maybe it was just a really good night’s rest. Maybe it happens during your late-night Doctor Who session. When their eyes are glued to the screen with their mouth open slightly and they reach to grab a handful of popcorn, and it takes three tries until their hand finally finds the bowl and not your pant leg. Maybe this is the moment that the lightning strikes.

Maybe there is no lightning, but a steady flow of sunbeams that have always been present. Maybe there are only triggers, and that overwhelming feeling, that panic attack-esque feeling of being in love for the first time, is really us just realizing we’ve been in love all along. Maybe there is no one moment we fall in love, or we just don’t feel it anyway, but we feel the moment that we realize we’ve been feeling the way we have because we’re in love.

I tend to believe that love is similar to grief, and happens in stages without our knowledge. And it happens at different paces for different people – for some it may only take a few days, for some, weeks or months, in some rare cases it may even take years.

Maybe the stages are the same as grief; maybe in the beginning we are in total and complete denial that we are in love, and we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe it’s denial because this feeling is too great, and this person really knows how to tell a story, and they clean up too nice, and their hair is too perfect, and they’re too kind to others, and they work out too much, and they are asking you too many questions about your job, and your major, and your feelings, and your mother, and your passions for you to actually be in love with, let alone for them to actually be in love with you.

Maybe by the end, we do really learn acceptance – maybe in the sense that we accept them for the little things; leaving the volume on the TV a little too high, the occasional hair on the soap bar, the fact that they don’t wait until the commercials to start telling you about their day, and by the time the commercials do come on, the story is over, it was anti-climactic, and now you have no idea who opened up the scoring in the game and the period is almost over and you know they'll talk through intermission so you won't be able to see what you missed.

But maybe we learn acceptance on an even deeper level. Maybe they’re not the ones we really need to accept. Yeah, they do clean up nice. But that tie wasn’t straight when he first put it on. Sure, their hair is flawless. But before you left the house, he had one strand sticking straight up and you think you’re dating Alfalfa. And maybe they are a really captivating storyteller. But it’s charming the way you take a year to tell a story, needing to tell every detail, stuttering and tripping over words, getting so animated, and ultimately forgetting where you’re even going with it, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve either lost everyone or they’re completely underwhelmed and it wasn’t really worth the effort it took to tell, or listen to. Maybe he can run a 5K and barely break a sweat, but I can sit in a coffee shop and write a novel about his kiss when he walks in the door from his run.

So maybe love doesn’t happen the first time you wake next to each other, or when you admit to them how old you were when you got lost on the way home from school and rode in a cop car to get home when you were in the first grade, or when they finally have your friends’ stamp of approval, or when your father tells them over dinner how you wanted to be a mermaid when you were younger and you cried when you realized you couldn't, but when we finally accept about ourselves the things we try so hard to force upon others to accept. When we’re finally in love with ourselves – that’s when love happens.

Depression is a journey and you can make it through

There’s no quick fix to depression. You won’t wake up one day feeling weightless. You will remove stones from your chest one day at a time.

It’s a slow process and some days you’ll feel just as heavy as months before. But one day you will wake up ready to face the day. It won’t be a perfect day but you’ll find yourself overcoming the gloom much easier.

It won’t rule your life anymore. You will sense it coming but it will leave just as fast. You will feel the darkness but the light will be there, too. You will hear yourself laugh when something is genuinely funny. It will be an unfamiliar sound but soon it will become recognizable again.

You’ll catch yourself smiling and it will reach all the way to your eyes. You will sleep through the night and wake up feeling well rested. You will go hang out with your friends or family and not make an excuse as to why you can’t make it.

Slowly you will begin to feel like your old self. You’ll have more energy. You’ll revisit your old hobbies and discover new ones.

People will tell you that you look different. You will think to yourself that you feel lighter. You lost the weight of the broken relationship. You lost the weight of the death of your friend.

You carry pieces of this time with you but it won’t pull you into the hole any longer. You will no longer feel as if you’re drowning.

You can finally breathe.

You will become worried that this newfound feeling is fleeting. But I assure you that it isn’t.

You have made it. You have found a way. You found the light.

It won’t always be easy to hold onto but you know it’s here. The light will never truly leave you.

Some days will seem dark but you will hold onto the flicker of light and it will persevere.

It’s only after you feel as if you’ve lost everything that you’re finally able to free yourself. 

Anxiety is a writer’s ailment

The process of personification aids catharsis; it makes palpable the otherwise abstract, sharpens the blurred grooves of consciousness into focused, delineated rows ready for observation and intricate deconstruction. It takes the otherwise non-human or illusory and gives it signs of life with the God-like audacity of the imagination, transforming everyday encounters, both unique and mundane, into moments of worth. Noteworthy. Book-worthy. Mental-delicacy consumption inviting.

A writer is, in effect, taking part in an imaginative degustation. But after the 10th course, the inevitable happens: you become overfull, slightly sickened with yourself, and begin experiencing the first pangs of regret. You realize you never savoured the flavor of the moment that you’ll never have again. You have a reconstruction of how you’ve idealized the entrée, with only a shard of original perception. Stuck somewhere in your cerebrum, bleeding out with the intolerable pain of not knowing if you’ll ever really find what you were looking for, but never found, in your memory…

To that effect, we’re all writers-some of us just choose to take on a passive role. The active ones, however, become skilled in personifying the unordinary to inconceivable heights, until anxiety becomes a host of unhealthy persons in your life.

Often it resembles the overbearing and toxic boyfriend, limiting your comfort with personal expression and growth. Magnifying mishaps into irreversible, catastrophic failures. Reminding you that you are NOT good enough; forcing you to question the weight of your worth at the cost of cheap metals, instead of gold.

Write when you feel stupid. Write when you think your idea is cliché. Write when you are embarrassed to place the words on paper. Write on despite the grammar and punctuation errors. WRITE. WRITE. WRITE.

It becomes the unattached lover, that doesn’t really want you. The one that leads you to stand in front of the mirror and feel a slight, growing disgust with yourself. A repulsion by the touch of your own fingertips against your skin, for want of a type of coarseness to reflect the callous you feel for yourself.

Sometimes, your anxiety is akin to a loner’s only friend. The one that concedes that you are everything awful and then some, but that that’s okay. That you’ll always have each other, and you’ll find your own way.

When you’re feeling better, it’s just a dishonest neighbor, which most of the time you ignore, and other times you reiterate the clear boundaries between your properties. This is my consciousness, my happiness, my existence, my framework within which I function, prosper and grow, if even with setbacks at several junctions, and then there’s yours. You can’t fathom its existence beyond the vision of it and its unsmug, but vain, face. It’s somewhere in the fabric of the being you perceive, but only from afar.

Other times anxiety is a dancer, mockingly swaying in both the shadows and the light. A ballerina that moves with distractingly exquisite grace, leaving a slowly-developing destructive trace where she has twirled around. Dancing to a timeless melody granting calm and serenity, divulged to none. Never tiring, never sinking, swaying, moving, breathing in a lightness you can never hope to achieve.

And sometimes anxiety is exactly what you think it is-a problem that isn’t really there. You know it’s a non-issue; you can pinpoint the moment you decided to personify it to something you are fully aware it is not. But you are a writer, and you have given life-not a murderer. And sometimes that anxiety, in whatever form it has taken on, simply needs to die a natural death. 

Run away with me

Pack your bags and leave your reservations behind. Unpack your hopes and your fears and every dream that you let drop by the wayside over the years. Pick up your wildest childhood fantasies and let’s steal away in the night. We’ll leave this wasteland, ditch this city, let the lights flicker off and burn out in our wake because we’re going somewhere where the sun burns long into the night.

Leave it all behind with me. We’ll run from our failures and misgivings, drench ourselves in sweet possibilities, dip our toes into the oceans of regret and dry our souls out in the sunlight of forgiveness. Forget about what was ever meant to come next. Forget the 9-5s, the wasted lives, the eventual decay of wasting away under someone else’s ideal of who you were meant to become. We’ll leave it all. We’ll pack up in the dead of night and find ourselves a world away by morning, with the wind at our backs and the sunrise on our skin.

Leave your pride and cynicism. Leave your bitterness and pain. We have no use for such things where we’re going; we’ll run straight out of the forest of our fears and strip ourselves of every limitation we’ve clung onto through the years. Take me to the dawn of all your passions, to the heart of your hopes, to the child that still lives on inside of you, with your dreams and understandings clasped between his tiny hands.

Don’t worry about right and wrong. Forget about all of the ought to’s and the maybes and the shoulds. There is a world that exists outside the land of right and wrong and together we can go and we can live there. We’ll worship compassion like religion and we’ll wash away our sins between the sheets. Let me see all of the best and all the worst of you. I’ll relish in the sunshine of your virtue. I’ll traverse the badlands of your heart.

We don’t have to live the way that we were meant to. There’s a secret I know about living and it’s written in the pattern of your skin, in the space that stretches in between your ribcage, in every breath you take that brings you one step closer to the life you should be living – beckoning you closer, calling you home. There’s a place out there for people like you and like me. There’s a world that I know we can take hold of, if you’ll leave your fears behind and come find it with me, agree to resign with me and walk into that bleary unknown of all your deepest desires and wildest dreams.

Please don’t give me excuses.

I am tired of being the one who hesitates, the one who deliberates, the one who is always being asked to stay, to stop, to settle down and think things over, when the desire to run is pulsating through my bloodstream with a strength and ferocity that I can no longer fail to give into.

I’m tired of making excuses, of crafting solutions, of taming and hiding and extinguishing this flame because the others cannot take the light. Let’s go somewhere where these fires can roar. We’ll fan the flame of every lust, light all of our longings on fire and watch our passion blaze into the night.

I see a flicker in your eyes and destruction in your smile. Together, we can burn this whole world down. 

Dallas Stars Casino Night 2016

This is the third year I've gone to the annual Dallas Stars Casino Night. As always, it was an absolutely amazing night with some great friends. I can't wait until next year (and to pick out next year's dress...)

My captain is prettier than yours

Sharpy makes me thank Chicago constantly 

Did I expect to fall for another goalie? Yeah, I guess I did

Spezza has humor and style and is a beast on the ice, can you ask for anything more?

Yes, I really enjoyed being able to see Oleksiak, he's a doll

Hemsky is just gorgeous, we all know his backup plan is in modeling 

Anyone that tries to say Goose isn't important to this team will answer to me (ง'̀-'́)ง

Demers was heartbroken I was more excited to see Tom than I was to see him... Ooops

It's okay, we made it up to Demers by making him the center of attention

Two jews and a redhead