I haven’t written a blog post in six months. I would usually apologize for that considering the point of a blog is to blog. If I’m gonna be apologetically authentic, then I can’t apologize because honestly, life got weird not just for me but for the whole world. The last time I posted was March 1. I was coasting into what would be the best part of my senior year and I was ready for the last two months of high school. The two months of the year I would consider my “prime time”. When I think back to March 1st and my pre-COVID life I kinda giggle at how different life would look in two short weeks. You know that meme where you're supposed to say “plot twist” when things go terribly wrong but you just gotta keep rolling.
Welllllll…… 2020 gave me quite the plot twist let me tell ya. For the first two months of what I would now label COVID life, I did not handle this plot twist with much grace. My poor parents probably thought I was gonna crawl in a hole and never come back after I experienced having all my last moments of senior year swept away. Beyond just missing events and opportunities, I lost my wings. I’m a pretty social butterfly and being quarantined away from the people, places, and moments I live for was suffocating. Fast forward to May and I wrote a pretty clever caption on my graduation picture thanking Clinton, my little town, for giving me my wings. At that point, I was starting to accept that there was purpose in the season of life that we will forever know as quarantine.
As time went on I felt like I could walk and talk and be a little more like myself. I picked up my first Bob Goff book and holyshablampow. Now, reading Everybody Always didn’t change the way the world around me was raining on my Senior year parade but it did change my perspective on how I react to it. I read it in about two days, hoping it would give me some inspiration for my FFA state officer candidate speech. Yes, I know that waiting to read a random book for inspiration for the speech I had been waiting 5 years to give with a fast approaching deadline might seem out there but hey -- that’s me. Having my dreams about state office significantly altered, experiencing a powerful life plot twist, and simply feeling lost, I needed my perspective fixed.
After reading this book and really reflecting on life in general I simply came out with this thought- Life is weird. That’s it. Life is weird and it’s short - your plans are gonna get wrecked, your dreams will get shattered, your heart will get broken, the timing will never be right, and in the end, we’ll be just fine. Life is weird. One of my favorite books is Where the Crawdads Sing, and it’s because of the plot twist at the very end. The same could be said about life. If things didn’t go terribly wrong they could never be terribly right either. So we got plot twisted; life got weird; and we loved each other through it. We grew because of it. We became more grateful because of it, and we came out just fine on the other side.
I can easily say I came into my freshman year of college better because of COVID. For me it was learning how to lead with love, with grace, with patience, with everybody always, because you never know when someone’s life is a little weird. And more than that because it’s too short to throw away time entangled in our desire to control it. When life got weird, it gave me more than a regular Senior year could ever have given me. I hope that just maybe it gave you something too.
XoXo,
Brooke <3
