Independence, again.

I really have not left my bed this morning. I slept a good nine hours and still feel tired. I did write some emails and start on my Comm paper but then I took a break to watch the preview for Time Travelers Wife {again} and read the whole synopsis of 500 Days of Summer. 

I have spent big chunks of my life apologizing for who I am, trying to make myself someone who I am not... and I am beginning to wonder if acceptance is my next step. Instead of trying to change who I am maybe I need to work with who I am... to be the best possible me.

Here is Who I Am:

For me, it is about who I am with not what I am doing. My honeymoon phase with Madrid is coming to a close, and while I still love Madrid, I love home more.

I miss being home. I miss being home.

And here I almost started to apologize for my above confession, preparing to write things like "I am still having the time of my life! I am learning so much! Look at me being independent! I plan trips go places make friends order drinks! Look Look Look!!!" but thats exhausting. Really what is happening is this: I am learning that I CAN be independent if I need to be. Do I want to be? No. Not saying that I want to be dependent because I think it is incorrect to assume that the opposite of independent is dependent because I most certainly not dependent. Would it make sense if I said that I wanted to be independent but not alone? Independent, but in the company of others? Is it possible to be a conditional independent? Now I am metacognizing and wondering why the fat (<-- chuck phrase, one of the faves) I keep stressing out over my own independence. Who am I trying to prove this to? Myself? Yes. But why? To know that if everything near and dear to me somehow left tomorrow I would be okay? But that is silly because if everything near and dear to me left tomorrow, no I would not be okay. Eventually, I would be better. So is all of this talk about independence just here to satiate my strange desire to know I would be okay if the worst happened? Maybe.

Here is what I know about myself:   {abridged}

Exploring makes me happy. Learning makes me happy. Reading makes me happy, sewing makes me feel alive, cooking makes me feel human, painting makes me feel creative, and writing reminds me of who I am. I like walking, running, baking, chatting... coffee, tea, cookies, smiles... laughing, playing, dancing,... fireplaces, animals, Christmas time, greeting cards, warm socks and warmer hugs. I like spending entire days outside in the sun and entire days in bed under the covers.

But most of all, I love the people I love. How simple is that. I love the people that I love. I love everything about them, all of them. I love their good days and their bad days, their quirks, the things they think are flaws, their humanness, and the way the laugh, the way they live and the way they love me. If home is where the heart is, I have more homes than I have fingers and toes. My heart is all over the world currently and because of this, it is not always here with me. I have addressed this before.

My Independence Plan is inherently and utterly flawed because I am attempting to protect myself from the very things I love most. I don't want to, in preparation for the worst, miss the best. I know that I have things that make me, me. Things that make me "independent." But the main things that make me, me, are other people. Not in the sense that my self worth gets wrapped up in these "other people" but in the sense that I would choose my loved ones over sewing, baking and Christmas every time. According to Oxford American Dictionaries, Independence is defined as "free from outside control, not influenced or affected by others." Without needing to go into a philosophical debate, I think it is fairly safe to say that I am, for the most part, in this tangible world, free from outside control (again I know I will be paying taxes and bills soon enough but go with me on this) but as for the second part of the definition... what if I want to be influenced and affected by others? Is this whole Learning Experience a matter of "glass half empty/half full?" Because if you read that and thought of all of your amazing friends and relatives, it is easy to want to be affected and influenced by them! Maybe independence is just a shield against the negative side of that definition. Maybe THAT is when I walk and skip and sing and do the things I love to remind myself that I, INDEPENDENT of the negative, am ME, a positive (most of the time), strong (getting stronger), loving (work in progress) individual who is just trying to BE as best as she can.