An Ode to my Scrubs

In my short 22 years of life I have learned a few things about myself: platinum blond was a horrible mistake, I do not love chocolate and peanut butter {yes this means Reese's, buckeyes, and whatever other combination you can't get enough of}, and I hate pants. I mean I really loathe them. I wear them in public because having an arrest record for public indecency would be hard to explain to any future employer. And yes there are dressed and blah blah blah but honestly, I'd prefer to just run around in my underwear. Maybe it has something to do with running around in a swimsuit for 16 years?

But I digress.

This last month I have spent what amounts to approximately 90% of my waking time in scrubs. This combined with three semesters of lab have taught me something new, of all the pants I have to wear, scrubs pants you vary between being my most hated and most loved item of clothing.

Much like finding the perfect pair of jeans, mastering the art of understanding scrub sizing becomes a fine art. Why? Scrubs run large. And by large I mean I made the mistake of ordering my very first pair in a regular medium. I'm by no means tiny and you could literally fit two of me in them and they covered my feet like I was wearing socks. Plus they lacked the elastic waistband that your grandmother swears by and I promise you she's right. It's life changing. They stretch, they stay up and you can get fat and your pants don't fit like they're judging your for your life decisions.  So once you master the art of sizing (a petite medium tends to work well on my 5'4" frame) you realize they come in so many colors and patterns and styles oh my! But of course you're going to be constrained to purchasing whatever your establishment requires which will not be that pattern you're currently drooling over. So you move along and settle for the fact that you have to purchase navy or grey or blue and you get them home and forget about them until you have to wear them again.

Only once you wear them do you suddenly realize how much you love pockets. Your scrub pants are in essence the "sexy" form of cargo pants. Look at all the things I can carry! I have pockets on my white coat, my scrub top, and I have 6 on my pants. Do you know how many pens, papers, calculators, notes, books, phones, and other crap that I forget to take out I can shove in there? ALL OF THE THINGS! But also once you wear them do you realize the downside. Why oh why dear scrubs must you attract every piece of lint known to man? Why does it look like I'm constantly shedding? Why do you never fade at the same rate so my pants are no longer the same color as my top? (Now maybe this is because I've been forced to purchase those boring dark colors but who knows).

Let's wrap this up. So, dear scrub pants, thank you for being otherworldly comfortable and hiding the fact that I only wash you once a semester (kidding... sort of). For pants, I guess you're not so bad.

Grief isn't simply felt. Grief is lived.

The hardest part about grief is that it is all consuming. It touches every aspect of your life whether you want it there or not, it interjects itself into every situation whether it was invited in or not. Things you once considered trivial or inconsequential suddenly hold new meaning for you. There will be times when something completely innocuous has the ability to stop you in your tracks and leave you overwhelmed with emotion, unable to breathe and at a complete loss. It could be a scent, a sound, someone's laughter, the way the sun hits a rooftop- anything.

And let's be honest here, for many of us grief is centered around a loss. For most of you reading this, you're young and so I hope this is irrelevant. But at the same time consider things like break-ups, broken trusts, broken relationships, and broken hearts. All of those cause us to grieve. For others it could be the loss of a job, a house, perhaps a death of someone close. Consider lost opportunities. Things we had the chance to do and something happened so that we couldn't. We grieve for lost moments. In some way or another I think most of us have experienced the pain of a loss and thus the grief that follows.

And those emotions that follow? They're hard. Grief doesn't fit itself into this small compartment of being sad and missing whatever was lost. Grief is so much more- anger, confusion, heartache, feelings of betrayal and inadequacy, confusion, the all encompassing question of why? All of these and more, emotions we can't name, but we know we feel all rolled into one heavy mass that sits on your chest and crushes your heart and makes it hard to breathe.

I don't think grief is something that we ever get over, but rather something we work into the daily fabric of our lives. This doesn't mean that we will always be sad, that we will always be angry, that we will always find that these emotions overwhelm and overpower us. I think it simply means that there will be a part of us that will always feel that loss. And even that's not a bad thing. Because maybe feeling that loss is in laughing about a great memory. Maybe in feeling that loss you're remembering a friend. Maybe in feeling that loss you're remembering why the relationship didn't work and setting yourself up for something better.

So while I don't know that grief ever truly leaves us, I know that it changes and eases and fades. It becomes softer than this raw emotion. It won't always be this painful though there may be parts that will always hurt. The grief becomes manageable, the hardest part is just having the patience to endure it until it does. So it's okay to break down and cry (holla at all the times I've found myself sobbing in the shower) because that's part of the healing process. So what if it means that you find yourself embarrassingly sobbing flat on your back in the middle of the park when 5 minutes before you were perfectly fine on a run? (...yep that happened this week too). Sometimes the emotions are too much to handle and so we need an outlet. So we lose it in the middle of doing something innocuous. But then we pick ourselves back up, brush off the leaves and dirt and tears and hurt, and keep moving forward. We don't stop running. We don't give up in the middle of our shower. We take 5 minutes (or twenty) to lose it completely and just immerse ourselves in our grief so that way we can let it fade. That way we can work it more something more manageable and incorporate it into our lives.

So maybe grief doesn't leave us, but maybe that's not a bad thing. Because I think that grief has the power to change us. And change us for the better if we let it. And the how isn't always clear and maybe to us it's never clear, but I think that in some way it touches us and has the power to make us better. Better listeners. Better lovers. Better somethings. Even if we don't know it right now.

Laughter in Place of Tears

You are so incredibly strong. A simple enough phrase and one that I've heard more than once in my life. People seem amazed that I am where I am in life and haven't suffered a complete mental breakdown as a result of losing my parents so young.

But this beleaguers the question, what defines strength? Every individual I'm sure has their own definition of what strength involves. Personally, I'm of the mindset that strength is something that's defined situationally. And so in my case, I take it to mean that I've made it through this tragedy with a lot of tears, a little grace, courage, but most of all hope.

I would not be strong without support and that's what I've been given from day one. Family, friends and even people who were strangers to me, but played a role in my parents life have embraced me with open arms at more than one time when I could no longer be strong for myself. It's these individuals who've taught me to keep moving forward and to have hope for the future. And so it's these individuals who I'd like to thank. I don't have time or space enough to put down specific names and I'd miss out on the nameless generosity of strangers. Without you, I wouldn't be where I am today. Without the love and acceptance I've received over the past 13 years, I would have found myself in a much different and a much more broken place. So today I wanted to take the time to acknowledge you and thank you and let you know that I hope I can do for you even a fraction of what you've done for me.

I won't lie. Today is incredibly hard. This whole week is hard. A loss this significant is one that is always felt and on days like today, it's a little more poignant. But I don't want to spend today remembering their absence. Today I want to celebrate their life and their memory. So once again I'm asking you to be my support, if you have a favorite memory or funny story about them, I'm asking that you please take the time to share it. Either comment down below or post it to my facebook. And even if you never knew them but maybe have a funny memory with me, then please share it.

Today my goal is to cry from laughter and I can't do that on my own.

I love all of you so very much.

Filter Free

 Take a moment and google the words “social media” and “loneliness.” Go on now, I’m giving you permission to take a break, stop reading this and type those three little words into your favorite search engine. {Then come back.}

So what popped up?

Well if you were too lazy to actually type in those words, I’ll tell you. Articles upon articles about how our society, while being the most connected we’ve ever been, also feels the most distant from one another. Studies showing correlation between the increasing friend count on your choice of social media and the rising depression, stress, and yes, loneliness that we struggle with.

This isn’t going to be a tirade about putting down our phones and being present in the moment {ironically enough written on a social media platform.} No, this will not be a diatribe against my generation for using and abusing a technology that while itself smart, makes us all dumb. Instead, I want to focus on one aspect of our social media use- perfectionism.

Pause for a brief moment and consider the vast number of filters you use in your everyday life. You filter the words you say {hopefully}, your search settings on Google, the people who show up on your social media: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc. etc. etc. I could probably go on for days, but you get the general idea.

And we filter ourselves. We only present the photos in which we look our best. We only post statuses and updates when we’re doing something we feel is worth sharing. We filter our photos to make them look better- and sometimes less real. We only present ourselves as perfect and in doing so we deny ourselves the ability to share with one another who we truly are. We contribute to this growing sense of panic that everyone is doing better than me, everyone has their life together, everyone is growing more beautiful as I fade etc. etc. etc.

But what if we stepped away from the filter? What if we gave the world the opportunity to see us with our flaws? Why do we shy away from the idea that it's okay to showcase our imperfections AND our best side?

Why do I have to hide behind a filter?

I've never wanted anyone to look at anything I've posted online and think "wow, she looks great here but I know for a fact that is not what she looks like in real life." The vast majority of the time I'm lucky if I remembered to put pants on in the morning let alone worry about if I'm presenting the most beautiful version of myself. It's too exhausting and too time consuming. And I'm not say it' a bad thing if you're that person that does get put together every morning, that's just not me.

So that's not the way I want to represent myself.

I want people to see that I sometimes make a fool of myself. Sometimes I take bad photos. Sometimes I don’t wear pants {alright those photos don’t exist}. I don’t want to be thought of as that girl who has all her ducks in a row {aka all her shit figured out} because I don’t!

I want to be a person who looks like their having fun, learning along the way, and figuring it all out. I’m not perfect, no one is. 

Scroll through my facebook and I guarentee you'll find some of the most unflattering shots. Sometimes I've made them my profile picture. It's okay to laugh- that's the point.

I would much rather give people a reason to smile than to present them with a false version of myself. I really have made all those faces in real life at some point and if you're lucky, you were holding a camera and caught it.

This isn't intended to knock down those people that do post the best versions of themselves. Rather, it should serve as a reminder that we all filter things and that in order to truly judge a persons life {aka figure out how much crazy they're hiding} you actually need to be present in that persons life.

Or just stalk even harder.

Future Pharmacists

I woke up this morning with a realization. I have nothing to do.

What? Where did time go?

We just took our last exam of P1 year yesterday morning. I'm a quarter of the way done to becoming Dr. Keller, halfway through school and I swear to you that I still order things off the children's menu at restaurants {Outback has the best mac n' cheese}. 

This realization, although a welcome break, threw me a little. Why?

 Maybe nostalgic would be a better word choice.

Looking back on this year I can without a doubt say I would never want to do it again. Ever. It was hard. I got 20 hours of sleep over a period of 6 days  mostly broken into 15 minute naps followed by a 2 hour crash. Check the alarms on my phone- I think I actually have one every 15 minutes.

But taking a moment to look past the late and sleepless nights, I can without a doubt say that I was happy.

I was happy because of the people that survived hell with me. I didn't know anyone going into pharmacy school and you'd think for a girl that goes to a college that has 1 other Perrysburg student that it wouldn't be a problem. It was actually terrifying.

Ready for the cliché line? I'm now lucky enough to say that some of those classmates are some of my best friends.

We had high points, low points, laughter, tears, a little pain, a lot more laughter and probably a little loss of sanity. But it was all worth it and all manageable because we had each other. I know personally that there were times I didn't think I was cut out for this, times when I thought I'd made a terrible mistake and that maybe I should have lived  out my kindergarten dream of being a teacher. And then I'd hear my phone go off and see a text from someone that said something along the lines of, "What the hell are we actually learning?" "I'm going to fail," or my personal favorite "So anyone want to become a stripper with me because that's my life plan once I drop out." It was little things that kept me sane and in line. If everyone else could struggle through it, then so could I. Sleep deprivation didn't seem so bad when I knew everyone else was up too. Chick-fil-a breakfast anyone?

There were times I think the only reason we all went to class was to see each other. That and to laugh at everyone from the night before.

Alright I'll wrap up the sappiness.

Congrats y'all, we survived. Can't wait to hang out all the time this summer {I will be living at your pool}. Oh and see you at dinner in an hour.

Grocery lists, laundry lists, to do lists, shit lists. Lists. Lists. Lists. Lists. Lists. We all have them and we all make them {mine are usually sub-grouped, color-coded and appear to have been thrown up on by a unicorn because of all the highlighter}.

Those aren't the kind of lists I want to talk about.

Chances are that you've clicked on at least one link that popped up on your news feed with a title
along the lines of, "21 ways to..." or "10 reasons...." and my personal favorite, "9 billion things..." Of late, the trend has been for people {bloggers, BuzzFeed, Thought Catalogue, Huffington Post- you get the picture} to post these lists of varying lengths all telling the readers that they should or should not be doing something.

Reasons I'm Single
Reasons I Should Be Single/In A Reltionship
Why I Should/Shouldn't Be Engaged In My Twenties
What I Should Be Doing In My Twenties
Lessons Every Twenty-Something Should Learn
Experiences Every Person Should Have

Well you know what?

Screw your lists.

I'm tired of being defined, judged, and advised by a stranger whose name may not even be on their piece. I'm aware that I'm young. And I'm aware that at this twenty-something age I don't know what I'm doing with my life, that the majority of us don't know what we're doing.

But hell, I don't even know what I want to eat half the time.

Part of growing up is working through that confusion for ourselves. How else are we supposed to learn some of the best things about ourselves when I can't work through it myself without some list telling me how I should be living?

I don't want that.

If I need advice on the best hotel in Costa Rica or the best place to eat in Savannah, then yes, I may look to your lists. But when I want advice because apparently I'm always an emotionally-unstable-lost-confused-naive-twenty-one-year-old, then I will turn to the people in my life who I know to be older and wiser. I want my friends and families opinions and support- not the words of a stranger behind a screen.

So goodbye to your lists telling me how I should live and offering up unsolicited advice.

I'm living life unlisted.

Roommate Vows

Living with roommates is, I imagine, much like being married with children.

"No way," all the married parents are probably thinking. Just hear me out on this one.

We all know the traditional wedding vow: I, (name), take you (name), to be my lawfully wedded (wife/husband), to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.

Now let's apply this to roommates.

I, {name}, take you {name(s)}, to be my contractually stuck-together house partner.

We all have been there. That moment where you're signing the lease on your house or apartment and you look at your future roommates and pray "Dear God let me have picked the right people." Now for most of us this is actually an exciting time. We're looking forward to the life we're going to build together in our new residence and thoughts of how the cleaning rotation are going to work and who's dishes are those growing things in the sink are far from your mind.

Give it two months.

...to have and to hold from this day forward...

You now have extra beds to climb in when yours feels lonely. A permanent cuddle partner that lives right down the hall? Yes please.

I hope your ready for your personal space to shrink. Privacy doesn't really exist anymore.
Good luck.

...for better or for worse...

Let's start with that for worse part. All of you are girls? You'll start cycling together. Have you ever had three girls PMSing at once? The amount of chocolate that will be consumed that week will be out of control and the amount of times someone starts a fight or cries will be something out of a horror/romantic comedy on steroids.

What about that time one of you came home too late and after a little too much fun? Guess who gets to hold her hair? Yep. {At this point it is also acceptable to laugh and take pictures}.

Think about all the other times you know you're at your worse: hell weeks through school, after break-ups, when you're on a diet. Now you get to love someone through all that.

At this point your honeymoon phase will be long over.

But the best part is, as long as you've chosen wisely, your roommates will love you through all of it.
And you'll have the opportunity to see these people shine.

Loving them through their worst means you won't be able to help but love them through their best.


... for richer, for poorer....

Your landlord made you sign a joint lease? I'm sorry to hear that. Bills become a touchy subject at times. It's never an easy thing to say, "Yo gurl gimme your money." Or something along those lines.

Fighting over the thermostat can and will happen.

Also be prepared to go around turning every light off in the house because they can and will be left on. You will also be guilty of doing this so unless it's extremely habitual, just hit the switch and don't start a fight.

...in sickness and in health...

One of you is sick? HAHAHAHAHA hope you have a lot of tissues and/or more than one bathroom. When you live together it's pretty much "what's mine is yours." This means when one of you is sick, it's almost guaranteed that you're going to pass it along to someone else in the house.

Now, if you're really lucky, your roommates will be those kind souls that go out and buy you saltines and popsicles because you're stuck in bed after hurling all night. That roommate should be the one you strive to find because they make your life easier and they actually still pretend to like you when you're leaking things out of every orifice.

Just be prepared to return the favor. And because you love them {or pretend to}, you will.
 
...to love and to cherish...

I hope you find or have roommates you love. Roommates can be people you simply live with, or they can be a family.

Yes you'll end up cleaning up their stuff and want to scream when they've left their laundry in the dryer for two weeks {I will take complete ownership of that one} but there are going to be memories that you'll make that you just can't share with anyone because you haven't lived with them.

...from this day forward until the lease does expire.

Hopefully if you haven't killed each other by this point {trust me there will be times when shoving someone off the balcony sounds like an amazing idea} you can either re-sign for next year or part with a friend you know you can count on.

And hey, if you do end up hating each other, you probably have some awesome stories.