Well, it’s been two months since I’ve last blogged and I guess that’s a good thing because all that means is I’ve been busy living my life!
The past couple months have been exciting! After a bit of a bout of sickness in May (nothing a little prednisone and antibiotics can’t fix), I was back in action and off living my life. I took an amazing trip to California, decided to move in with my boyfriend, and will be moving this weekend!
These past few months have certainly been stressful…. but in a weird way– I’ve been thankful for getting to experience this crazy life as an adult. I guess I never really pictured a future this real and this grown up. The future for me growing up was always sort of a gray area. When I was younger, in my head, I pictured working somewhere, living on my own, maybe having my own dog, etc…. but it all sort of seemed like a fantasy and not something that would actually end up happening. Somewhere deep down in my angsty 16 year old mind…I guess I thought I’d be much sicker, not being healthy enough to move out of my parents house, maybe working a job close to home and not being able to care for myself, pay my own bills, or struggle in any way other than having CF. I guess I took “living in the present” a little too literally and failed to actually imagine that I would some day grow up and be an actual normal adult. But I’ve developed this (strange) profound gratefulness for “the struggle,” simply because I never actually thought I would get to experience it, and also because I’m used to my only issue in life being having CF… so it’s sort of a relief to experience the hardships of life unrelated to CF whatsoever.
Having to pay like 10 bills all in the same week and not having enough money that paycheck to cover it….
Touring apartments– seeing some real doozies, and falling in love with one
Feeling a piece of your soul being ripped out of you when you make your gigantic monthly student loan payment
Dipping into your savings to go on the vacation of a lifetime even if that means eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day during your trip because you are young and there’s no time like the present to live your life!!
Cooking for yourself, burning a few dinners, and coming out with a few masterpieces. Also eating Annie’s mac and cheese or random combinations of food like popcorn, pretzels, yogurt, and grapes for dinner because you forgot to go grocery shopping.
Trying to figure out how to buy all of the delicious food you want to eat and not have it go moldy or stale by the time you eat it (hint, freeze EVERYTHING)
Actually staying in on a weekend night, by yourself, watching netflix and going to bed by 10
Being an Auntie 🙂 (actually not part of the struggle and actually wicked awesome)
Working your first job out of college– feeling the stress of trying to do a good job in a way that actually affects other people and not just your report card/final grade
And finally… eating an entire large jar of nutella in one week (I don’t know how this is related to the struggle of being an adult, but somehow, it made me feel proud)
All of these things, while sometimes stressful, have actually given me an immense amount of appreciation for having to work hard and make sacrifices for the life I want to live. I know that I’ll look back on these years and laugh at how new it all was to me, I’ll laugh at how simple life was and how complicated I thought it felt at the time, but most of all I’ll appreciate that I got to live it, in a normal way, like a normal 20 something year old who’s life expectancy happens to be about 15 years away. And hopefully, when I’m looking back at all that, I’ll be thinking how cool it is that I surpassed that magic number and am now living an entirely new life that I never thought I’d reach 🙂
