I actually have a few reflections I’ve written as I’ve been decluttering our house that I’m planning to share this month! Yay for some writing inspo again. It’s been a drought over here for a while.
Last night I was looking for a saved Instagram post. It was a video of a bucket full of fluffy white kittens set to cute music. (I’m obsessed with cats, for the uninitiated, although I can’t keep one because my husband has allergies. So videos have to substitute for the real thing.)
Anyways, I thought I hadn’t saved many Instagram posts over the years. I didn’t remember saving too many.
I thought it would be easy to find the kittens.
You probably know where this is going… the kittens were hundreds of posts down, and getting back to fall 2017 (when the post was dated) was an ordeal. Not just “my finger is going to fall off from scrolling” but “wow, remember all these dreams and goals and values I once had that I don’t have anymore?”
I often recall the time that’s passed since I graduated college (in March 2017) as one big blur. Like there’s been no depth to my life beyond the huge milestones we’ve crammed in: three moves, wedding, house, dog, children. It’s so easy to remember the big photographable moments and so easy to forget the milestones along the path of one’s inner growth.
I scrolled past all the COVID posts, and all the things I thought and felt and wondered about in the past 18 months. Goodness, I was so miserable during my height-of-the-pandemic pregnancy. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
All the new mom posts from the first few months of little E’s life. All the conflicting advice given to new moms about feeding, sleep, making it through the days. Thank goodness that phase is done, too.
Or all the photos I saved of Norway before we planned a trip there in December 2018. We didn’t get to go because I had such bad morning sickness with my first pregnancy. I almost wish we had because of all the COVID restrictions that feel like they’ll last forever. In the most literal sense, I did give up a piece of myself–my love of travel–in favor of starting a family. I don’t even have the option to go there now.
I felt so many different emotions: sadness, twinges of regret, guilt, pity for my past self.
Physically, I’ve hardly traveled in the past few years; we haven’t been out of Minnesota since January 2019.
Mentally, I feel like I have been everywhere and back. To the brinks and boundaries, peering into the abysses of humanity. So many dark, terrible, hopeless places. So many places where I arrived, looked around and discovered that everyone around me was motivated by fear, not love like I’d hoped. That this new place—that felt so full of promise from afar—was not home, either.
(I didn’t promise this would be a happy reflection, okay?)
Outside, I look pretty much the same as I did when I graduated. A few more wrinkles around the eyes; five pounds and a jean size on 22-year-old Claire. C’est la vie. I’ve had two kids. I still look damn good, IMO.
Inside I feel like I’ve aged much more than the almost-five years that have passed. Often I wish I could see the world in the way that I used to: so idealistic, so empowered, so full of hope for change. But lines have been drawn, points of no return have been passed. In the quietest but surest sense of those words.
How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart, you begin to understand: there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend, some hurts that go too deep—that have taken hold. ~ “The Return of the King”
Ultimately, I came home to myself and realized that the sense of out-of-placeness I’ve had my whole life does matter, and does require change. Big, unconventional scary change—my least favorite kind.
Anyways… that’s what I did last night. The kittens were just as cute as I remember them.
Maybe when we move out of this country and have a little country cottage in the woods somewhere, I’ll get an outdoor cat… more fulfilling and less emotional than combing through years of forgotten dreams on Instagram.