30 Things: Day 22

day 22- what makes you different from everyone else?

This Who song is playing in my head as I start to type out this blog.

WHAT makes me different? I know who made me, where I came from, where I am now, and where I want to be soon and in the not so near future. But what makes me so re markedly different? I worked really, really damn hard when I was a teenager and got a really, really good job when I was 21. That was 9 years ago, well 10 if you count the internship. I've been doing what I do for 10 years, 14 1/2 if you count the volunteer work. I think that's very notable. I signed my signature over and over and over again on documents to the title of a house when I was 23 years old. That's pretty damn cool. I walked on a car lot as a single woman at the ripe old age of 24, told the car salesman that I wanted to test drive a 50K brand new car that was sitting on his lot, and then I told him I wanted to buy it. No co-signer, just me and my proof of income. I drove home in that car about an hour later. Take that misogynistic car sales industry! Yeah, OK, those are things I've done, accomplished, have to show for some hard work and a lot of overtime, but it's not exactly WHO I am. Really WHO I am or was got me those things.

Now what makes me different? Sometimes I just feel like a girl still waiting to grow up, sometimes I feel like a woman who has it figured out, sometimes I feel sexy, sometimes I feel like I don't want anyone looking at me. I felt broken and lost just a few months ago. Shattered. A shell of someone who used to look forward to living. Someone who used to laugh and still carry other people's burdens. Someone who's door was always open for her friends and family. Then it all came crashing down. It was expected that I would continue to be the rescuer, the burden carrier, the one with the big heart and the dry shoulder. I clearly forgot who I was and what I needed, because I stopped putting myself first, I forgot how to say "no", "stop", "enough!" and then...I let all that baggage drag me down. I was drowning. Suffocating.

Luckily, I feel like there's been new life breathed into me lately, like someone came along and saw my lifeless, passionless, angry self that was desperately in need of a few big breaths of relief. peace, and hope to bring me back to life. I literally had to pull myself out from underneath some people to get where I am now. I had to extract myself physically, emotionally, and mentally from a few very close people's lives to feel like I wasn't suffocating and being stepped on. I got there because I lost track of who I was, what I needed, and what made me different amongst the crowd.

Despite the fact that I've spent quite a bit of time on my social experiment lately and writing the best "me" to find me the best "him", I honestly couldn't come up with a quick answer to this last week when I had the good intentions on writing this. So, I turned to the people. My Facebook friends. Sometimes you just need a different perspective. They said these things:

You care, genuinely care.
You travel more than most.
You have a low bullshit tolerance and you're not afraid to say it out loud when you're not buying it.
You won't let anyone step on your toes, you're in charge, and were when you were younger.
You're not afraid to step out of the box that society puts us all in.
You're fiercely loyal and commit 100%
You give big, laugh big, love big, and party big.
You stand for what you believe in.
You live by doing not by standing by and seeing what happens.
You believe in honesty, don't put on a show for others, you don't give expecting in return, you're genuine.
You admit that life is shitty but also amazing.

They said amazing things that I will be glad to claim and wouldn't be ashamed of if they ended up carved on my tombstone. Yes, I said tombstone, like in a Western. Tombstones belong to folks like me & Wyatt Earp...ya know (: inside joke :)

In the end, I'm just me, good, bad, or otherwise. I'm not perfect, but I'm not totally rotten. I won't back down but I won't put up a fight for something that I don't believe in. I can forgive, I will forgive, but I won't forget. I want the things that money can't buy. I want people to think well of me, but I don't care to be the center of attention, the object of men's desire, or the most popular. I want to be loved, I want to be happy, and I want to look back on my life without regrets and with a smile on my old wrinkled face. I want my smile lines, my callused hands, and my battle scars to tell their own stories.

I am the same as everyone else who wants to live a happy, full life and I'm different than everyone else because they will never have lived MY life, THIS life, full of my own successes and failures, my shattered expectations, my dreams that faded away, and all the moments, past and yet to come, that took my breath away.


To thine own self be true - Shakespeare