little mountains

Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to climb up a mountain covered in gravel, wearing flip-flops and carrying boulders in both hands.

Or just trying to pass a driving test.

It's the same thing, really.

I mean, people pass their driving tests all the time. They obviously also climb mountains covered in gravel all the time.

Or maybe I just have an inherent flaw that causes me to be unable to pass my class 5 driving test. But this pattern of thinking breeds the kind of self-worthlessness I'm trying to avoid in my general life. So I'll write about it instead, something that I'm good at. Obviously being a bus driver is not my calling.

{shout out to the friendly dude who failed me by the way, you were pretty cool.}

The thing about battling anxiety and depression, is that when something normal like failing a driving test happens, my body's response is to panic, shut down, and assume the world will promptly end and everyone I love will decide I am no longer a worthy human being and therefore not worthy of their love.

This, of course, is one hundred percent incorrect. My best friend, in response to my self-destructive tendencies in situations like this, put those thoughts out of my mind with a simple phrase.

'This does not define you.'

I am not a girl who failed her full license for the second time, I am a writer, an artist, a dancer, a good human, I go to the fucking University of British Columbia for sociology and creative writing, and I love autumn.

I just can't rent a car-to-go or drive the kids I nanny to hockey. I just have to stick a little green sign on the back of my car.

So I will leave you with this today. They are not my words, they are his, but I will impart them to you because wisdom deserves to be shared.

This does not define you.

Whatever 'this' is. I am not alone in my struggle to climb a mountain covered in gravel wearing flip-flops and carrying a boulder in each hand.

Your mountain does not define you.

You are so much more than this.

University Day One: head colds, new friends, and excellent professors

Well, here I am. Sipping lemon ginger tea with honey and basking in the afternoon sunshine to soothe my aching bones. To be clear, university isn't the thing that is making my bones ache, but a vicious head cold I've been fighting for weeks. University, rather, is making my mind soar and my identity take on a fluid state that all at once terrifies and excites me to extremes.

I've seen friends altered incredibly by this mysterious place of higher learning, but I never fully internalized what it would mean for me. That I would forget myself and everything that once used to occupy my mind completely. How I would develop like a darkroom photographic print, cutting off vestigial parts of me to let new limbs grow.

The first thing I noticed about university was that everyone (mostly) is in the same position. I arrived early and anxious to my Gender, Race, Sexuality, Social Justice 101 class to find fifty-ish people crowded around the classroom door, nervously clutching notebooks and oversized textbooks to their class. It was liberating and calming to realize that everyone was just wishing the person next to them would take out their earbuds and say hey.

The second thing I realized was that professors aren't scary, disconnected monsters. Rather, they are human beings just as I am, who sat in my same position, in a 100-level course, feeling the same overwhelming emotions as I was.

So, before I get too philosophical or idyllic, I will leave you with this. I have never been so excited to learn in my whole life. I have never loved terror so much, akin to the sensation of traveling without a plan. I have only my hopes and expectations, assumptions and changing self, as I write this. 

I have high, high hopes for you, UBC.

Love always,

Coral

Transitions: or crises, coffee, and contemplation

I'm starting school tomorrow.

I went shopping for school supplies today, and came out with some notebooks, a couple binders, a pencil case, some pens, pencils, and highlighters. I had completely forgotten how to back to school shop. I realized I didn't even have a backpack big enough to hold said binders.

I've been missing Paris lately. It's strange, how something can become one's whole life, an integral part of one's identity, the first thing one has in their back pocket to separate themselves from their surroundings, so quickly. And so reversibly. I cultivated a life in Paris, and met my soul mates between sips of good red wine and a river lit up by irreplaceable lights. I became a mother to a child I would miss like a daughter, and I hung the city's map on my wall so I would be able to memorize the nuances of every bend in the metro system and every monument in each arrondissement.

And then it all dissipated. And I was left back here, where I'd started, a completely different human being, in an environment all too familiar after being lost in foreign places for a year. I moved back in to my childhood bedroom, reunited with my best friends, visited my neighbourhood Starbucks, and got a job. I tried to attack life back home with the same fervour I'd traveled Europe with, and left little time for contemplation or reflection. But I had overgrown my tiny bedroom, and the streets I'd walked before the cobbles of Budapest and the fields of Edinburgh, and it all felt so small. 

So it crept up on me, this date which will arrive tomorrow. And I know, once this new chapter has begun - the train pulling out of the station like the one that carried me from Brussels to Bruges without a plan - I will be able to move, and grow. I will be altered again, meeting new kindred spirits and learning things that will change my views once more. Humans are not static creatures.

But for now, I sit here in bed, thinking I should probably get to sleep early, drinking tea at eleven p.m., wondering who I will meet tomorrow and wishing away this transition period of long commutes and part-time jobs and scattered friends around the world like fairy dust.

I guess I'll treat this new adventure like hopping on a plane to Germany: utterly terrified, full of useless plans, pictured scenarios, and a whole lot of hope.

Happy September First.

Love always,

Coral