I thought about this title for a long time, and in every way that I try to phrase and rephrase it, it comes back to this one word, unpacking. Unpacking my mind. Unpacking my heart. Unpacking my house. Unpacking my home. Unpacking me.

In these last few (two) weeks, change has come like tidal waves. With little room to take a moment to breathe or even stay afloat, I have busied myself in rowing like my life depends on it. 6 AM wake ups. Midnight bedtimes. Splitting time and energy between here and there. Errands here. Studies there. Life’s demands in between. I have been scrambling, but I have made it through to the other side. Despite the emotional burdens weighing me down, I have made it through. And that’s what it’s about, the small successes. Because if we let go of those, it’s pretty dang hard to appreciate the very notion of existence itself.

But, I digress – though, there’s nothing new there; I feel I am made up of a million tiny digressions just waiting to be encouraged to go on a tangent with. Back to unpacking.

I have been boxing up my childhood and preparing to move forward into the next milestone of my life, and it has been one of the most difficult things I’ve done. To decide which of my memories to carry with me (if any), which to leave behind in order to start afresh, and to open up wounds that I thought I’d allowed to heal over time. But like all wounds, the faint lines remain no matter how many years go by, and with the right amount of pressure or discomfort, it will appear on the surface. And they appeared. So many lines appeared, my goodness. All the ones I had pushed forward from. The ones I thought I’d healed from. They were all ripped open and not only was I trying to pack away a quarter of a century worth of memories, but now I was also balancing all the feelings that each and every one carried and trying not to be buried under the weight of both packing and feeling. I came into it with a clinical approach – throw what I no longer need, carry forward what I will continue to use, and pack into storage the things that I am tied to but don’t use daily. But, unexpectedly, left feeling overwhelmed that I might not be making the right choices after all.

Here’s the thing though: doing the right thing for yourself often feels like the wrong thing for quite some time. In fact, it almost never feels like the right thing. Because it feels like breaking. But consider this, perhaps healing would never happen if there was never a break in the first place. Perhaps we’d never even know there is room for growth if the cracks didn’t appear or we didn’t start spilling from the cup we have filled up for ourselves. And that’s hard to do. I know first hand just how hard that is to do, but when it happens, you will get it, and it will make sense (eventually).

I am trying so hard here not to be a cliche or add in that line about things falling into place at the right time with almost little to no effort, but sometimes it just so happens that way. Even as I am trying not to forge any new bonds or maintain that which doesn’t maintain me, I find things slowly but surely slotting themselves into place where I never thought they would, and that’s okay. In any and every case, it is okay.

Whether you are unpacking every part of who you are or simply okay with where you are at right now, you are doing just perfectly and I am so incredibly proud of you for surviving.

My love, you have survived so well, and I look forward to us stepping into living together.