Twenty-Six from Twenty-Six

It’s my last day of being twenty-six today. So here, in no particular order, are twenty-six reflections on my twenty-sixth year.

1. Twenty-six is a weird age to say you are. I tried to avoid it. I’m an odd year’d human.
2. The first time I played a real volleyball game since high school was just at the start of the year. I walked to my car feeling more alive than I remembered. It was fun. It is fun.
3. I decided in September that if I was going to spend this much money on the gym, I guess I better take my health seriously.
4. Actually, I decided that when, at my monthly weight check, the numbers had gone up instead of down, after being static, static, static, and I was finally, on that Monday morning, ready to do something about it.
5. I meditated every day of my twenty-sixth year.
6. I attended zero weddings.
7. I attended one funeral.
8. I will never forget watching my grandmother say goodbye to her sister.
9. Funerals are for the living and I realize I am one of those people who needs them.
10. I spent Christmas with my family, after two years alone, and now I can never go back.
11. I was grieving, grieving, grieving in waves for lost loves, but then, in the spring, those old stories ended. They are, as someone once told me, just somethings that happened. Not somethings that sit on my heart like cement.
12. It is pure magic and love to cry on a cabin floor with a little whiskey in your cup and feel the gold mend the cracks back together. We will be different, but we can be whole again.
13. My brother got engaged in November and I was so, so scared that I wouldn’t be happy. I was wrong.
14. Suddenly the advice I heard for years clicked. I need to write every day. I write every day.
15. My dad sent me a daily stoic post on how appreciation is something you give yourself. That’s why it’s called self-esteem. It changed me.
16. My dad and I walked five miles along the beach every morning we spend in Hawai’i.
17. My mom got her new hip. And was stronger and braver and much less whiney than I would have been.
18. We gathered around my mom in her bed while she rested her new hip – the ladies from my family during Thanksgiving up north – and had Amanda tell her engagement story. It was intimate and fun.
19. My new phone is named Adrien. His alter ego is Chat Noir.
20. In December, I got two tattoos. A blue Voltron symbol on my ankle. And a red and blue spider-man design on my wrist. I got the latter on New Year’s Eve. My reward for my year of Rhythm.
21. I have lost 40 pounds in my twenty-sixth year.
22. I decided to stop coloring my hair.
23. I still drink Diet Coke. But for the whole of October, I didn’t have any at all.
24. I rewatched Parks & Rec twice. Haikyuu twice. Brooklyn 99 twice. The Dragon Prince twice. Probably more. Definitely more. But I started reading books again. Voraciously.
25. Netflix announced that they are doing a live-action reboot of Avatar: The Last Airbender and it is still the best news I’ve heard all year.
26. Twenty-six is not my favorite age to say I am. But twenty-six has been awfully kind to me. It is, perhaps since I was nineteen, the first age I feel like I am myself.

With Love,
Natalie