“find a seat kid”
We occupy so many spaces and identities all at the same time. We are someone’s best friend, coworker, teammate, sibling, and can become everything and nothing to someone all at once. We sit between the lines of someone’s life poem and for others we serve to not exist in the plot of how they come together at all. I believe that for some I am only intended to be a fleeting character whereas for others I see myself willingly and enthusiastically going the extra mile to lengthen my stay in their storyline. To discover new parts of myself I often have to retire old identities which can mean stepping out of someone’s life to start dancing on my own again. I treat every new friendship or relationship as an opportunity to begin again: begin sharing, listening and appreciating what we each bring to the table and regardless of the amount of time we have together I hope to leave with a lasting taste of kindness and gratitude.
And as I continue to go through college I realized that I am ceaselessly liberating myself of the spaces that are no longer true to who I am. The girl I was a year ago would relish in the woman I am today. The first step in that journey was cutting off my friendship with the Culver’s that is two blocks from my house. But, I have found that life has no schedule as to when it's going to advise you to invite change. In fact change may patiently knock at your door till you've run out of the energy to ignore it any longer. Now I find the idea much more welcoming, I wait on the invitation a little less and open the door to new people a bit sooner. And the people we choose to be to others is inevitably up to you and you only. We have the freedom to pick the roles we play and that responsibility is a bit daunting but nonetheless exciting. Each person that pulls a chair up to my table teaches me something about myself I had yet to learn.
Many of them stay, perhaps because we eat good and plenty at my table or maybe because they think I am funny, hopefully the ladder but some leave and if they decide to return I hope they know I may no longer be the person I was when they first found a seat. Throughout my life especially in highschool and my beginning years of college the chairs I allowed people to sit on were shallow, and required little effort to obtain. Keeping myself in a highschool relationship that completely overstayed its welcome often blinded me from all the other people in my life that were trying to fill me with confidence but I was too busy digesting the negatives to recognize.
Many of us simultaneously accept the good and bad because it is too difficult to understand how someone could love you in a way that is entirely self-sacrificing but not serving you at all.
No longer attempting to balance the lightswitch of what is true and false of me, I now find that the seats at my table are slim and acknowledge that they are ever changing. I pray that some seats are permanent and some invest in staying a while but I also recognize as I continue to grow the needs I have from the people sitting continue to develop. The seats I open now require people to dig deeper, ask for more, and give me the assertion to sit a tad taller.
Embrace sitting at a table that feeds your fire and feel free to push in your chair whenever you feel the company there has given you what you need to flourish elsewhere.
And I hope if or when you return you have a new found appetite to enjoy the people present and indulge in the opportunities ahead of you.
