and with grace and grace and grace

Last night, a friend asked me how my summer had been going.

"Lots of work," I texted back, "lots of back and forth. Lots of chaos. I feel like I can't even remember it all."

No, I can't seem to remember it all, and if I'm being honest, I struggle to describe it. Life has spun a thousand miles a minute the past few months, and in so many ways it has been so good, so special - though I'd be lying if I said I didn't find myself craving a moment to breathe every now and then. So far, this year has been a bundle of contradictions: slow and hectic, uncertain and stable, heavy and light. I talk to friends and they feel the same way - is this the erratic rhythm of being in your twenties? I find myself certain yet confused, hopeful yet worn, and I wonder how to make sense of it all, how best to move forward when things feel murky and strange.

"Happy, free, confused, and lonely" never felt quite so close.

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Today, I turn 22.

It crept up on me this year, courtesy of a July that has flown by in a blur of humidity and friendship and hastily scribbled journal entries. Normally, the time between my sister's birthday at the beginning of the month and my own feels more marked, but this time it's slipped through my fingers like seawater. I don't even think I really processed the fact that it was nearly here, which, knowing me, might have been for the best.

Birthdays have always made me existential. (And I truly do mean always - according to my mom, turning four was absolutely devastating to me.) I find myself spending the weeks leading up obsessing over all I've yet to do and accomplish, panicking over all the upcoming year will hold. This year, though, has been such a whirlwind that I find myself unusually calm as the next trip around the sun approaches. Maybe August will be the month that brings my latest existential crisis, or maybe I'm finally coming a little bit more to terms with the fact that there's no use in anything but open hands.

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21 was a year of hurting and healing. It was fast and strange and full of so much that felt new. A year that felt like a demolition of sorts, but also like rebuilding. I have a feeling that 22 will be a little like that, too.

I never pictured that I would be where I am, that life would look like it does, but I'm finding that there's a special sort of hope in that, in the knowledge that I'm not steering the ship. In the fact that I'm here, and my people are here, and that's more than enough. Months and months ago, I remember coming across a post by Written to Speak that read, "let mercy meet the madness", and in so many ways, I feel like that's the defining phrase of the past few years of life - so much madness, but mercy that supersedes it all, that's carried me through in ways I'll never begin to be able to put to the page.

It's 2am now, and I'm penning these words in the dark, listening to the hum of the cicadas outside my window. I'm wrapped in my favorite sweatshirt, a soft gray one with long drawstrings that I bought at goodwill for three dollars because it reminded me of the beach, and my cat is curled up asleep at my feet for the first night in months. The quiet is comforting, and the summer night is warm, and I feel my eyelids beginning to grow heavy.

And maybe I don't know what the year will bring, but I know that it began with doughnuts in the kitchen, because according to Taylor swift, 22 is breakfast at midnight. I know that it began with laughter, and dramatic singing, and texts that leave me marveling at the people God has let me have in my world. It began with my mom and my sisters and the peace that comes from a night after a July thunderstorm.

There is a very big piece of me that is purely terrified of a new year - that's scared to death to keep building this life, to make so many different decisions and jumps. Scared of failing, of making the wrong call, of all that will come that I can't control.

And yet, over and over, when I think of life and 22 and whatever wild adventure this year will be, I think of words that my dear, dear friend, Hannah wrote this past week that have been dancing through my mind ever since:

"Do it afraid, do it badly,
But do it earnestly
And with grace and grace and grace."

Because, as she has often reminded me, doing it afraid is just as brave - maybe braver. And so I carry that with me in my pocket, clinging to grace all the more tightly - do it afraid, do it badly, but do it earnestly. Do the next thing - and the next and the next and the next.

And I think maybe that's how you build a life - how you build an adventure.

So here's to you, 22 - to being uncertain and shaky, but here and sustained despite it all. To being happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time, to hopefully being a little less miserable and a whole lot more magical, and to a year of breakfast at midnight and falling in love with strangers. :-) I don't know what it will hold, but like Taylor says - I know that I'll just keep dancing.