Last night we both had good cries and then we had good talks. I have had a few insightful chats with a few friends in the “best friend” tier lately; the through-lines have been: change, societal expectations, “adulthood” (whatever that means), joy, letting go, and just generally recognizing there is a beauty in authentically owning your own path. For a lot of us our current lives look nothing like what we’d been told they would or should. Society didn’t display my version of 30. 25 year old me was drowning and felt so afraid that “my plan”, the plan that everyone in my circle was on, had crashed down in front of me. I knew one way of things... school, wife, job, babies. I saw that as the only version of happy. A big “work hard now so you can enjoy the future”. I am a Taurus *pause for reader’s eye-roll*, and ya girl loves stability. I may have some big hurricane energy sometimes, but in reality I just want the peace and calm of consistency. Hit me with a dose of that predictability drug and I am HOOKED. The “plan” I had grown up seeing and hearing gave me that and when I didn’t see it playing out for me, I was petrified. For awhile I didn’t know if I was going to be able to have “happy” because my life wasn’t looking like all my friends’ lives. The plan was seemingly working for them. About 2 years ago, thank you pandemic for many forced solo introspective retreats, I realized “the plan” wasn’t working for me because it wasn’t my plan. It was a hard change to look at, it’s still a hard change to try and dissect, but it was the best change. There are a lot of big changes happening. Changes in the world, as a general collective, and in the microcosm of my life and the lives of my nearest and dearest. The biggest theme I have loved watching though is the move towards the acceptance of individuality in the collective we call humanity. Recognizing that there is no one path, one plan, one picture of a happy life. Owning that we can love and still remain a collective without being a copy and paste format. (Cont. in comments)