Carry On:

You will be walking up 9th Avenue.

You will be listening to Otis Redding in your living room. You will be cleaning your bathtub on a Friday night. You will be swooning over color samples and old records and dusty, antique furniture.

You will be praising a dresser that is painted a fading teal and rummaging through terrible old paintings to find a treasure to create on. You will be giggling quietly to yourself under a Duane Reade umbrella as it's pouring and you're getting drenched. You will not even care.

You will be sitting at Lincoln Center with your dog in your lap. You will be singing showtunes to him as you carry him home. You will be eating a doughnut filled with jam on your way to an art store. You will be sitting at a fountain with the sun pressing on to your face, breathing in as deeply as you can.

And it will hit you:

You are happy.
Wildly, unabashedly, internally, externally happy.

You are happy completely and totally alone. Preferring it, for the most part. Happy surrounded by your girlfriends, listening to them talk, watching their faces light up. Happy talking to the check-out girl, the coffee barista, the old man who works in the lobby of one of your most frequented places. Who blesses you every time you say hello to him. You are happy regardless of the circumstances, the pressures, the demands and the noise swarming around you like gnats on a summer day. Happy regardless if the phone rings, if the email comes through, if you ever hear back. Happy of an equal measure when you are with him and when you are without him and recognizing the miracle that is.

You will be so happy, in fact, that you are increasingly grateful for the past three years. The past twenty-five. You would like to kiss each cheek of the sadness that followed you around, thanking it for getting you to where you are. You want to write a love letter to the chunks of time you did not speak, the people who ripped your heart open, the ways in which you hated yourself. You will think back to the times in your life where you felt like the world was ending and now see them as the biggest and brightest gifts.

Then something else will come: you will feel an incredible need to share this joy. You will be that friend who is annoyingly positive, who phrases things in affirming ways, who assigns homework and suggestions when they're really just looking for someone to agree. You will realize that you are called to help people live their best lives possible and you will delicately, barely, dangle your feet into those waters, knowing you'll jump in when you're ready.

You will be writing a blog post on a Saturday night. You will not agonize over the choice you made to stay home and you will not wonder what you're missing out on. You will be deliriously excited to be in your pajamas, in your bed, with salt and vinegar chips and the TV on in the background. And it will hit you: you are so happy.