Say Cheese

One thing I’ve learned in the past several years is to embrace being cheesy. Seriously. Embrace the cheese. Embrace being sloppy and sappy and over the top. Ferris Bueller said it best. Life comes at you fast. Take the pictures and keep them even if you have a double chin or you can’t stand the fly aways in your hair or the outfit you were wearing or the photobomber in the background. 

Just take the picture.

There are so many pictures of my mom that I will never have because of the way she felt about her body that day or because she threw a hand up in front of the lens before I could snap it.

Just take the pictures.

Moan and groan as your family all huddles together because of that one relative that will inevitably stack up five books on a coffee table, set the timer and run to make it in front of the tree just in time.

Just remember to take the pictures. Not just pictures. THE pictures.

You may think you will always want to remember the salad you ate or the outfit you wore that day. 

You won’t.

You’ll want to remember standing uncomfortably close to your siblings in front of a Christmas tree or that trip with your dad or that shopping trip selfie with your mom. 

I’m feeling nostalgic and creative and pent up and sad and happy today. Which, obviously, those things are a great combo. I am a very levelheaded individual after all.

Right now, I love having friends next door. I love cooking soup. I love watching TV shows that make me cry every other episode. I love feeling like I finally have a family that’s just mine. I love running the heat too high instead of putting on layers. I love photographs and song lyrics and the way the sun looks different in wintertime. Brighter. More aggressive, but not aggressive enough to beat the chill in the air. 

But the thing is, loving life makes Christmas even harder somehow.

Like, why do I want to participate in the consumerism and the panic when I have everything I could’ve ever asked Santa for?

Shopping for the people I love feels counterintuitive. Like, I love you. And all I want to do is just love you. Spend time with you. Eat with you. Drink with you. Laugh with you. Play really stupid games and gossip about something benign. But if you really want to keep up the tradition of buying sweaters or whatever, I’ll oblige. Begrudgingly. But I will.

On another note: There’s this feeling I can’t shake that I will never know what I actually want to do. What’s even worse is that I fear I will never be brave enough to do the things I know wholeheartedly I want to do. Write books, take trips, fix my mental. Whatever it is. Those are the hard things. The things you want but are so big and bad you can’t even tackle them. But then. Then there’s the phone calls and the emails I should’ve sent months ago. There’s the housework and the laundry still in the washer waiting to be changed over. And tell me why sometimes those things feel just as hard. Why is it I can spend hours making dinner and feel completely at peace, but putting underwear in the dryer seems unreasonable?

I spent so much time deconstructing ultra damaging religious thought patterns. I spent so much time repairing my wings I forgot I still had access to the sky. I spent so much time investing or being forced to release relationships. I spent so much time forgetting the bad things so I could still love the good ones. I spent so much time grieving that I forgot my own damn self. 

And now that I have steadiness, I can say I’m grateful that for the most part, the hardest things are the littlest. 

But I’m still probably not going to do them today.

And that’s okay sometimes.