I’m sitting on my couch staring out the window, a practice I do quite often these days, and all of a sudden I’m thinking about the times we spent together. I’m thinking about your laugh, your smile, the way you hold a tea cup. To put it simply: I miss you. And then I start to wonder what’s happening in my head that I miss you. Was it the bird I noticed outside the window that reminded me of how windows let me see things, and was it that thought that took me to the kitchen window where we sat eating popcorn, and was it that image that brought back the aromas and smells of my childhood kitchen?

Recently, I decided to donate to someone’s online fundraiser. They were going through a hard time and needed money. As I went to the checkout, there was a checkbox that said “Do you want to remain anonymous?” Checking this box meant that my name wouldn’t be included on the GoFundMe page. I paused for a minute to think about why I would want to make my name known as a donor.

In some ways, we experience our lives a bit like we might experience a movie. Events happen, we react to them. We’re the audience and the protagonist. But, unlike the audience and protagonist, we end up creating emotions from scratch. We decide our own triggers, habits, likes, and dislikes. We decide what deserves the audience’s attention. Most people go through life feeling like the actor and the audience only, without realizing they also produce and direct this show, with a script that is being revealed in pieces, like episodes of a show.

+++ title = “10” date = 2019 +++ When I created this blog, I thought I would import all of my old blog posts to make this archive comprehensive. I’ve been writing since 2001 (Livejournal), so I have a lot of posts backed up. While I haven’t written daily until just a few years ago, I went through stints of writing in my blog every few months or years. When I imported all of my old posts, some written when I was just 15 years old, I cringed.

It seems like every day as an adult, life becomes more real. All the things we feared as children are coming true: disease, death, broken relationships, and other things. It seems like no one actually taught us what do when we grieve. Whether it’s losing a loved one or a childhood bed, no one taught us how to handle it when we need to say goodbye to something that has accumulated so much meaning in our lives.