My Life

Happiness is a Bird

November 13, 2018 By Gabrielle Eck Leave a Comment

Happiness is a bird. A tiny, delicate, fragile, beautiful little bird.

But it’s hard to manage, because you have to hold it in your hands every day. If you just leave it in a cage and look at it, it will die. But carrying it with you all the time is just as dangerous. If you hold it too tightly, you’ll crush it. But if you hold it too loosely, it will fly away.

Have you ever felt like your current happiness was too fragile and fleeting to ever last? Sometimes I just think that because things are going so well right now, there is no way that this level of happiness is sustainable. Which then makes me feel like an eternal pessimist, unable to live in the moment and just appreciate how great things are going for me at this particular point in my life. My sister told me once that I’m constantly looking for the next worst thing to happen. Constantly anticipating the demise of whatever awesome thing is going on right now. I never really believed her until recently.

The struggle is twofold. I’m in a really good relationship with a sweet guy, and have a fantastic amazing job that I truly love, a boss that is a mentor to me and a wonderful person. BUT. At what point do you ever decide that something is forever? I’ve made the mistake of thinking both a relationship and a career would be “forever” before, and both those things are now just memories. Like, BOLD of me to assume that this is what I want for the rest of eternity, right? Ten years can really change a person. Change your views, change your goals, change everything about your life. So how could I be so arrogant to assume that this relationship I’m in right now or this job that I love right now are things I will still want ten years from now? There’s no way at all to predict that.

Happiness is a bird. If I decide that I’m content in my life, I’ll be trapped in the “forever” cage again, and my happiness will eventually die of natural causes. I need changing scenery, I need new people, I need surprises and last-minute 180’s. Complacency is the death of all of that, and therefore the death of happiness. But if I am neglectful of all the good that is happening in my life, it will also cease to be good, and that too will cause the death of happiness.

The answer to all this is exactly what it needs to be. Just because something doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing. The pain of something ending does not outweigh the joy that the thing brought you in doing it. I’m learning to hold onto the bird and admire it and love it and keep it alive. It’s a work in progress.

Losing Time: A Look Back at My 20’s

October 17, 2018 By Gabrielle Eck Leave a Comment

Not to be dramatic, but I’m almost 30.

And for whatever reason, it’s starting to feel like a milestone.

So if you’re into reading about how weird other people’s lives are, welcome! Let’s get started.

Fresh out of college, I found myself in a unique situation. I graduated on a Saturday and started what I truly thought would be my forever career the following Monday. Yes, that’s correct. Literally 48 hours between college and career. I started working at my family’s business because I thought it was the right thing to do. None of my brothers or sisters or cousins wanted to work there, and someone had to keep it in the family. Might as well be me, right?

And the most ridiculous part about this whole thing is that I kept doing that. Over and over and over again, for years. I did what I thought was “the right thing to do”, even though it may not necessarily have been what I truly wanted. I was also in a humongous hurry to have “accomplished something”. I’m not sure what the rush was, but I dove headfirst into a long string of choices that I made because I thought it’s what I was supposed to do. Graduate college. Get a job. Get married. Buy a house. Have babies.

Etc. etc. and so on and so forth.

I did every single one of those things, in “perfect” order. This was the way things were done, I thought. The way things happened. I was in love, so we got engaged. It’s just what came after dating. And then after that, we got married, because that’s what you do after you get engaged. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to (or allowed myself to, whichever…) take a step back and realize that I let a lot of these things happen because I just thought “well, that’s what you do”. Engaged people get married. Married people buy houses. I was “doing everything right”. If you wanted to be happy, this was the blueprint to follow.

So I followed it – and watched it all unravel.

I don’t want to ever come across as sorry for any of the choices I’ve made. So far, it seems that life is just a big string of choices, one after the other, and then just dealing with the consequences of those choices. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve made some wrong ones. Some bad decisions that led to less than positive outcomes. But that being said, I don’t know that I would change any of those choices. I’m extremely thankful for everything I’ve experienced and the places and people I’ve encountered because of choices I’ve made, even if things were hard at the time. I’m grateful to every person who has helped make my life into what it is today. Which I realize sounds trite, but whatever. I’ve learned so much, especially from the hard times.

It’s not so much that I think that I lost a bunch of time in my 20’s as it is about how I felt for most of the decade. I always sort of felt like I was in this big hurry. Everything was a rush. Hurry up and graduate so you can start that job. Hurry up and get engaged so you can get married. It was some sort of imaginary checklist I was working on. Rushing to check off all the boxes as if having all the items on the list completed would automatically mean I had accomplished “a good life”.

What I’ve mostly come to realize, though, is that the script I was following wasn’t real.

The boxes I was checking off, while they might be the right choices for someone else, weren’t necessarily right for me at the time. I wasn’t running out of time, and I’m still not.

I didn’t lose any time by spending my 20’s the way that I did. But I’m certainly going to use it as a barometer for how I live in my 30’s. I’m not going to let myself just conform to societal norms because it seems like the right thing to do, or because I feel like time is running out, or because everyone else is doing it, or whatever bullshit reason. I’ll also no longer let myself make any long-term decisions based on how likely I am to fail at that thing. I’m going to be a little more okay with trying, but failing. I like to think I’ll fail gracefully, but who knows. Maybe it’ll all go down in flames.

Making decisions is hard, but after a while, your indecision becomes a decision. So I’ve decided that I’m going to spend the rest of my 29th year exactly how I want to, and I’m pretty excited about that.

A Year of Change, and Other Hard Things

October 8, 2018 By Gabrielle Eck Leave a Comment

As a disclaimer, this post is going to be very much focused on me. I try not to do this (usually). I try to write objectively, informatively even. But being my first post back after very long hiatus, I’m going to take this opportunity to be a little selfish, and to share what I’m going through and what has kept me away. Also this is my blog so I’ll write about what I want thankyouverymuch. (I mean that last part in only the most loving way possible. ILY.)

I’m a firm believer that any real journey that inspires change of any kind should start with a bit of self-reflection. This, however, is usually easier said than done, mostly because there are more than a few pieces of my personality that I’d rather keep behind closed doors and not acknowledge. (This is putting it lightly. In actuality, these pieces are kept locked in the basement, chained to the furnace under the stairs.) But, unfortunately, it is these parts most of all that should be taken out and inspected under the harsh daylight of reality every once in a while.

Recently I’ve had to do this more than I’m comfortable with, because lately my life has been a very strange and unpredictable journey of weirdness.

I’ve been struggling, honestly. I’m still in the middle of a divorce that has consumed most of my brain space for the better part of the year. Yes, that’s right. I’m now a 29 year old divorce. I’ve moved out of my four bedroom house into a 900 square foot apartment. I quit my shiny new job, and got a way newer shinier job. (No, not all of these life changes have been bad!) But mostly, I’ve just been working on adjusting to this life that I never expected or planned for. The last bit is what is probably the most difficult; not being married is something I literally never planned for. Then again, I don’t think anyone goes into their fresh new marriage with a divorce backup plan in place, do they? Maybe they do – that’s what prenups are for.

Anyhow, through all of this I’ve been able to draw some neat conclusions. Mostly, that real change is stupid and hard. (Maybe not completely stupid, but sort of. And definitely hard.) I enjoy unpredictability. I like changing plans at the last minute. I’m not someone who has to do a ton of research before traveling to a new place. I got a cat one day because it felt like a good day to get a cat. (In hindsight, it was not a good day to get a cat.) I consider myself pretty adaptable and able to go with the flow. But this year has been nothing short of an earthquake that has caused enormous destruction to the life I thought I would have. And this year has been just steady ripples of the aftershock of my divorce.

I’ve learned things about myself on this journey. One of those things is that I would like to focus more clearly on building my life intentionally. I tend to slide without resistance into complacency, and I need to check myself on that. I want to make sure that I am laying the track for myself rather than just following the wind and seeing where I wind up. I lack direction sometimes, and that’s okay. But it’s something I need to work on.

But I think most importantly, I’ve learned that it’s okay to struggle. It’s okay to feel weird and to not know what’s going to happen. And honestly, it’s okay to not be okay sometimes. We tend to want to protect ourselves from bad things happening to us, or do everything in our power to stay inside the comfortable bubbles we’ve taken years and years to build for ourselves. But sometimes that bubble pops, and things become intense and painful and bad very quickly. But I’ve tried really hard to embrace the bad with the good, and to be thankful for all of it. One thing I’m sure of is that more changes are on the horizon. And I’m going to do my best. And everything will be okay, even if it doesn’t go like I planned.

Main navigation