More by: Cortnee

You’re goddamn right. That summer was about renewal, in so many forms. Being broken up with for the first time was such a fucking slap in the face that those first few months were really fucking tough on the old heart and soul. But once I realized how much I deserved and just how little of that I’d been getting, I knew I had to re-evaluate my entire life. And from that re-evaluation came so much liberation and even more than liberation, a shit-ton of fun. 

I looked around at the life I’d formed for myself, at everyone I’d left in the dust, and at everything in between and realized I didn’t even know what kind of person I’d let myself become. Having a horde of half-assed friends and letting my long-lasting connections go to the wayside, that was never me. My entire life I knew the value of someone who’d been there through thick and thin, someone who’d seen me in my eighth-grade dorkiness and my high school bad reputations and my early twenties-total bitch phase and who still loved me despite it all. Or maybe because of it.

Suddenly the value of people who didn’t take themselves or their lives very seriously at all hit me full force. People who could laugh at their idiosyncrasies, their imperfections, and all the writing that was on the wall. People who didn’t need to prove themselves, who didn’t have their shit together but who didn’t need to have it together, people with heart and passion that had nothing to do with hairstyles or dress codes. 

Walking into a room filled with people I’d only gotten to know through passionate drunk-talk (one of my favorite things to watch while sober, by the way: passionate drunk talk) suddenly felt like home. That summer was about taking everything I had and everything I thought I knew and throwing it out the window and starting over. I’d never, up until those three unseasonably rainy months, realized the pure fucking beauty of starting over. Change really is the only constant. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because, too often, something ends in order for something better to begin. And holy shit, suddenly it felt like I was seeing myself for the first time.

“My house burned down. Everything I had was destroyed, again. It feels better everytime.” 

right.