a love letter to my 20s.

i remember when i first met you. i got butterflies in my belly as i flirted with you for the few weeks prior to you finally welcoming me into your arms. i was still just a college student living in the dorms, and even though i had met some pretty wild characters at ucsc, i had never met anyone like you before. you were so....charming, to say the least. simply put, i was smitten by my idea of you - the promise of adventure, living on the edge, romantic(ized) everything, and the possibilities! and even though i felt some hesitation in my overall sense of you, i trusted my gut and went along for the ride. (i guess i didn't really have a choice.)  

and what. a. ride.

you took me through:

graduating college,

getting my first job working for m.i. figuring out how to negotiate inside a giant bureaucracy,

working full time + interning with intervarsity, and running on 5 hours of sleep/day for an entire year

caving and getting my first cell phone (the number, which i still have and the phone model too - razor!)

receiving a phone call from my sister that completely changed the trajectory of how i wanted to live my life.

pursuing a year of intense therapy - aka: the year i cried more than any other time in my life

not speaking to my parents for almost a year

learning to create boundaries with my family

waking up.

falling in love with my family.

befriending/being befriended by steph chui

meeting amy rainbow and receiving her immense love for me

working at one of the most dysfunctional organizations

quitting and finding one of the healthiest organizations

marrying off my closest girlfriends

making lifelong friends, breaking up with friends.
finding a church community

meeting the fosths

embracing my inner bon qui qui

and finding out she's actually quite sweet and sensitive.

learning to listen to, and follow my heart.

lindy hopping
moving into a barn.

meeting my first camera

experiencing zero creative gap from vision to execution via photography. (the first was when i drew that penguin in mrs. shoop's 2nd grade class.)

journeying to arizona to meet jesh, amy, and other new friends from experiencing love workshop

becoming sage's aunt and experiencing first love!

witnessing the birth of jesse (by way of mary)

transforming hate of running into inexplicable love of it

running my first marathon, and later, my first ultramarathon

first fractured bone

sharing my heart and life's work in front of 500 people.

painfully hiking up the tallest point in the contiguous united states,

receiving help to do so.

buying my first bike, going on first bike tours

falling in love with montana and oregon

learning to backpack, with firsts in multi-day and solo trips

opening my heart to the possibility of love,

and having it hurt, badly.

but somehow continuing to say, yesyesyes!

essentially, 

you jarringly woke me up from my life's slumber and then proceeded to shower me loads of delightful affection. it came in the form of balloons, giant trees, open skies, lots of mileage, adventure, pain, joy, and people people people people people! the hesitation i originally felt had mostly to do with not knowing where you were going to take me, but i can see now (10 years later) that i shouldn't have doubted you. ever. because all you had for me were (very) good things...even if they at first appeared in horrifying ways. (i guess this really only happened once or twice - when you totally scared the shit out of me!)

your gifts to me are innumerable. and as spastic as some of them were....most of them were incredibly thoughtful.

you taught me the way of hospitality, grace, joy, love, gratitude, serendipity, of going with the flow and being.
you taught me that i'm not lacking anything and that i'm beloved, just as i am.
you taught me that i really don't know what the hell i'm doing!
you taught me to just relax and stop pretending like i know. (no one knows really knows what they're doing.)
you taught me that life is all about the little things and the here and now.
you taught me that above all, it's about loving God and loving people.

i hope to reach more deeply into those things in this new decade. 

i'll remember you with deep fondness, for there will never again be such a time as this.
thank you.

(taken on nov 21, 2012 - the final day of my 20s!)

see ya when i see ya!

lizzy