And we're here! I am feeling all kinds of emotion as I settle into the city. My family headed back to OKC yesterday and I am spending my first full day at a local coffee shop drinking a very well-made chai tea latte and attempting to process just some of the many new things.
No one really prepares you for this time of life. It's just (straight up) a weird time. You can't really grasp it until you're in it. It is one full of loneliness and change and newness and unfamiliar stuff but also good and also necessary. The past few months were some of the most challenging of my life. I was in Waco finishing graduate school courses while my friends moved away and settled into their new jobs and new lives. In Waco I felt extremely unsettled and unsatisfied. I poured myself into school work so badly craving a transition into something new.
Although the past few months were some of the loneliest times (I gotta admit, it was a loneliness no one could have fixed for me), I've never felt more supported in my life than I have over the past 6 months. My move to DC has been no different. Through this season of moving and change and unfamiliar faces, I have been reminded, in little ways, of the things that make me who I am and that I am never alone. Through simple going away cards, unexpected country music in a coffee shop, a FaceTime with a friend, master's thesis writing, walks through the city, and a chai tea latte, I am reminded of the things I love and am so grateful for. I am currently clinging to these and celebrating each of them. Small victories.
Over the past semester I felt independent in a lonely kind of way but the last few days have been independent in a freeing kind of way. This kind of independence I so badly need and have so badly craved. I am thankful for time by myself today. Being in DC, I can already tell, will be an opportunity for me to learn about what I need. (I currently know nothing about my own needs so really looking forward to this. S/O to the Enneagram). It will be challenging but also refreshing. I have a week until I go to work so I'll spend the next several days letting delivery guys with my stuff into my apartment and, when something isn't being delivered, I'll probably walk around and try to find the grocery stores.
I am so grateful that I am never alone and that the Lord walks alongside me so patiently and so faithfully in this season where nothing else feels like that. I am thankful today for the little things and will hold on to them so tightly. This is going to be some kind of journey, I'm pretty sure.
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