TOW: Acceptance

It's funny how much things can change in a year.

I think back to last summer, and how different my life was then versus now. 

I'm not going to lie.  I used to hate Toronto.  And I would be lying if I said I'm now in love with Toronto.


Instead, I feel like the longer I live here, the more I come towards a happy medium, something a little closer to normal, a little farther away from the crazy sort of way things were when I first arrived.   More than anything, I really feel like things keep changing for the better...and that the more I focus on the little things that make me happy and successful, the more life around here seems to normalizes.  In a city like Toronto, where crazy is the new black, that's saying quite a lot.  You just have to find your bubble, I guess.

I often compare living here to living in Belgium.  It's funny, living in Belgium, I should have felt worse.  I couldn't get a full-time job there, couldn't speak either national language with any skill, and I spent a lot of time alone, and screwed up a lot while I was there. 

But Belgium was where I first became an adult.  Everything that had anything to do with becoming self-sufficient, and taking care of myself.  Everything was great.  Every challenge was fresh, and no words can describe the adventure of living by yourself in a country a million miles from home.  It's liberating and exhaustingly fun all at the same time,

Toronto, instead, was kind of a step backwards.  It was a big city (big minus) it was unfriendly in a Canadian sort of way (bigger minus) and I tried my best to make good choices for myself, and a combination of circumstances and attemps to 'do the right thing' ended me up in so much more trouble that I almost never saw the end of it.  (Biggest minus)  My goals have really changed in the last couple of years, and sometimes it was a really hard change to face. 

But with time, and my late twenties (soon to be early thirties, eep) comes a different kind of understanding of my life, and the phases in it.  Where in my twenties I was running at a break-neck speed towards a goal that eventually stopped existing, I have a feeling my thirties (if I make it there, you know, don't get hit by a bus and all that) will be about taking my energy and trying to make something that's going to last.  And part of making things last relies on accepting the present for what it is and leaving the past in the past, all while having hope for the future.  Because we all need hope.

The one thing that has really hit me over the past two weeks or so is that you can avoid facts for only so long before it becomes symptomatic of a bigger health problem, physical or otherwise.  And the fact is that you own your own life.  You can love it, or hate it.  You can find every crazy, embarrassing thing that is wrong about your life a total drag, or you can accept these things for what they are, a type of growing pain we always seem to experience, again and again. 

And accepting you for being you, at the present moment, is no easy thing.  But I think it's a worthwhile exercise.