BLOG POST 13

Being 24… During this year of my life, I’ve challenged every thought in my mind. I’ve settled for less than I deserve and been thrown away more times than I can count. I’ve loved and lost a lot. Yet resilience flows through my body. Learning, loving, and living are what my life entails.

I’ve spent more time thinking than truly living. Being lost is my biggest vice—not knowing how to navigate my life while hoping to find someone who may want to live a life with me. This month has been full of dating, and I’ve realized there’s no rush on falling in love and having a family. I’m still a baby when it comes to this thing called life.

The rush is societal pressure and all the movies shoved in our faces growing up. We see our old classmates rushing to have kids and settle down, entirely forgetting they’re supposed to live their lives too. As much as I’ve been a sucker for love, it does not define me.

I am someone capable of thoughts, feelings, correction, reevaluation, reconsideration, resilience, and redirection. I am evolving every single day. So why would I ever feel the need to add a man to my less-than-perfect life? Having fun is all I want to do. Maybe I’ll mess up again, but recently I ran into an online therapist who stated that healing is about reopening your “healed” wounds a million times and learning how to heal yourself each time it happens.

“Your wounds are going to open and close multiple times in your life. They are going to heal and then be ripped open again by something you didn’t expect. That’s normal; that’s expected as we grow and change, adapt to different experiences, meet different people, and get into different relationships. Different things heal those wounds, and different things reopen those wounds. The purpose of healing is to spend time understanding how to ride through that phase, how to survive better through the openings, and how they close back up again. You’re not doing it wrong if it still hurts.” — Sam, the therapist on TikTok.

My all-or-nothing addictive personality has been fixated on the completion of me while reading the instructions wrong. There is no antidote that will fix a person and make them whole; instead, you will always be actively running, putting life’s fires out. You are not meant to be engulfed in the flames; rather, you are made to live through all things that try to hurt you. Resilience and strength, but more so faith, are essential.

There are brighter days ahead, even if those brighter days are on fire. You are the one meant to put them out and walk across the ash to your brightest day. I can go from a low point in my life to seeing the path clear. There’s no more drowning involved or months of wasting away. A revelation in my life occurred, and I realized that everything that has happened was meant to happen.

The fog lifted, and I was met with clear skies. The clarity hit me: maybe you aren’t so messed up. Maybe all the mistakes you made were simply because this is your first time living life. Who knew? Not me. Unless there is some perfect correlation to your life at the right time, you can hear all the advice in the world but never fully indulge in it.

There’s something beautifully painful about certain people and things leaving your life. It’s like a beautiful vase shattering; you often think about its beauty and reminisce about what it used to be. But by God, if something isn’t for you, it won’t stay. The pain comes from the attachment, and little did I know I was blind to the beauty of reminiscing. I can find myself so attached, clinging to, praying for, and hoping it’ll stay while also staring into the beauty of what has gone. I scream at myself to let it go, let it leave, because it’s not yours to keep. The beauty is in the future. You can miss every single part of someone and still keep them in your heart. I finally made that connection.

Send them light and love and let it go. It was never about forgetting someone or having to be 100 percent healed, where you don’t miss them when you see them. It’s more about loving them and knowing they might love you too, but in this life, you cannot be together. We are all meant for so much more than we realize. What was once broken is not fixed; it’s simply healed enough to know the difference between why the answer was always no. The door was closed, the key was thrown away—God told me no; He told me to wait. The sense of relief I feel and happiness is overwhelming because deep in my heart, I knew this wasn’t meant for me. I handcuffed myself and left claw marks in everything I loved, hoping it would stay. But it didn’t.

I questioned God, I questioned love, and I questioned myself entirely. I’m so lucky to have been rejected, to have felt embarrassed or ashamed, because those feelings helped me find my heart today. She was confused, tired, hurt, and very angry, but the door is open for my future. This feeling is like no other. Overwhelmingly beautiful, this life is mine, and I get to make it something every single day. I get to run free and be wildly insane, inappropriate, happy, sad, or mad. I get to make my life my own because of all the things I’ve faced and all the times I’ve had the door slammed in front of me.

My wounds have bandages over them; they may fall off, but I know how to put them back on again. I know how to heal myself when I’m bleeding. I’m my own saving grace, and by God, no one is going to stop me from loving myself. She’s so much more than I’ve realized—she is me. I am her, and we are one. Resilience flows through my veins, no matter how much I’ve been shoved down. I get up and fight. 

Being 24 is beautiful. Serina is beautiful.