thirty days of thirty years: twenty-nine

Year twenty-nine, age twenty-eight: September 2010-2011.

When Nathan and I moved to the mountains in Colorado, we dove right in to life. The day that we officially moved into our church house we knocked down at least one wall. We started up a new business recycling used automotive oil, which we aptly called, Green Thum. It took several months to start up, of course, so we were poor for a while and could only afford to entertain ourselves with free internet TV.

It was actually pretty easy to meet people and make friends in our small, mountain town. First off, it is a small town so it felt like everyone had heard of us, the couple that bought the old Presbyterian church, before they met us so many of our first interactions with people happened like this: Someone would come up to us and say, "Aren't you the couple that bought that old church?" and we would reply something like, "Yes, I'm Nathan and this is my wife, Ashley."

Nate and I also pursued the opportunity to be involved with Young Life in the valley, as it was just starting up for the first time in more than a decade. I, of course, have a huge heart for Young Life as it was one of the greatest influences on my life and Nathan has a heart for me, so he gave it a shot. Now, I kid you not, every time Nathan gives thanks for a meal that we are about to eat at our house, he prays for the high school kids in Grand County and asks that we can continue to be a part of what God is doing there.

There was definitely a time during our first, long winter in the mountains that Nathan deeply missed the place he called home and the people he called friends for the first thirty-one years of his life. It felt like we were floundering for a bit trying to start our business and we were inside at home pretty much all the time, escaping the snow and cold and working on one thing or another, so it was hard to tell when it was supposed to be time to relax.

But soon enough our business started to become more than a pipe dream and we started to meet people through Young Life and the churches we were visiting and this young-adult hang out that we would go to every couple weeks. So by the time January rolled around, Nathan was attending the first Bible study of his life and I found one as well. We were really starting to connect with people on a deeper level and these were people we could really call friends.

Toward the beginning of the year I was offered a part time position at Crooked Creek Ranch, the Young Life camp about twenty minutes away from my house. It turned out to be a really great job for me and it allowed me to still maintain my responsibilities as C.E.O. of Green Thum, which is my official title because I said so.

It was during this year that I really started to feel this sense that so much of the waiting I had done for all those years in my early- to mid-twenties was for such a time as this. I was finally getting the satisfaction and joy from my jobs that every person wishes they could have. I was in a happy, happy marriage with a person who is 100% right for me and we had three wonderful pets. I had many wonderful friends, both near and far away, and a home and community in a place that inspires me. I even felt like, after I had married into a wonderful family, I had a mom for the first time in my life.

It's not that I looked around and thought to myself, "I've arrived," but I definitely thought, "now, I see."  Now I see how the heartache and loss and longing were meant to do something in me rather than to me.  Now I see how all those jobs and adventures were equipping me to be successful, even-- or, especially--  if it weren't in a traditional way. Now I see how it didn't really matter where I lived because I will end up where I belong when the time is right.

There was a time last year when I felt like I wanted to write everyone who had supported me during my internship year at Frontier Ranch and thank them for that, because in supporting a wandering twenty-one year-old, they had given me the opportunity to end up where I am in this time. I think it is important to support people in whatever they feel purposeful about because it gives us the opportunity to be a part of that greater purpose. When I look back on all the people who gave me financial support, prayers, late night phone calls, a couch to crash on, words of encouragement and station wagon moving services, I want to bottle up my blessings and give each of them a drink because that is their victory, too.

Cheers.

thirty days of thirty years: twenty-eight

Year twenty-eight, age twenty-seven: September 2009-2010.

I had been dating Nathan Thum for just a little while before I knew that he was the one for me. We had our ups and downs like every couple, but most of our downs came from outside of us. We were pretty great together, actually. We figured that 90% of the time things were easy and we wondered why we ever wasted so much time in relationships that didn't have such a positive percentage yield. I think that too many people hear the cliche that relationships are hard, and they forget that they are not supposed to be that hard. Also, it is difficult to know until you just know, as they say. You spend a lot of time wondering, could this be it?

On our first date, months earlier, Nate said to me at one point, "I like how you share what you're feeling." I think I said something like, "Really? Thanks," but inside I was going, What? No you don't. Guys don't like when girls share their feelings. That's when I really knew that this guy was something special; he wasn't squeamish about what he found inside when I opened up a little.

The thing is that so many of my previous experiences with Christian guys-- although not all of them, to be fair--  led me to believe that they wanted more of a wall flower than wild flower; someone who would not speak until spoken to, at least when it came to my feelings about our relationship. I don't mean to judge their hearts, by any means, because I did after all find something admirable and honorable in them. But I do think that too many Christians have been ill-prepared for entering into dating relationships in a healthy way.

For a long time I knew that I wanted an out-of-the-box kind of Christian, someone who didn't necessarily speak the language or obey all of the rules of the sub-culture. I went a little too outside of the box for the comfort of many who knew and loved me when I started dating someone who didn't quite match me in the way we walked our personal faiths. We weren't even sure if he was a Christian. Or if he was but just didn't like using all the same words to say so, or didn't yet know how to really go to church or fellowship or do all the other things that Christians normally do.

Nate and I were very intentional about working this out because we both knew that even though we were a match in every other way, the faith piece was a deal-breaker. I would come to realize over time that we were very like-minded, actually, and that he was more pure of heart than many so-called Christians I have met.

We loved to travel and find adventure together and one day we found this mid-century church building that was for sale in Granby, CO. We started dreaming about the life we could live together up in the mountains, and I love that we weren't afraid to do so.

It is a long story, really, the way we came about getting engaged and buying a church house within a matter of minutes, although not necessarily in that order. Suffice it to say that by this time Nathan had earned my trust and, as I told him when he had gotten up off his knee in the basement of a hotel in downtown Denver with the auctioneer bid-calling in the background, "I don't know about all this going on around us, but I know about us."

Two-and a half months later Nathan and I were married on the most perfect Sunday afternoon in June. I wore Spanish lace and walked down the aisle to Jars of Clay's, This Road:

All heavy laden, acquainted with sorrow

May Christ in our marrow, carry us home

From alabaster come blessings of laughter

A fragrance of passion and joy from the truth

Grant the unbroken tears ever flowing

From hearts of contrition only for you

May sin never hold true that love never broke through

For God's mercy holds us and we are his own

This road that we travel, may it be the straight and narrow

God give us peace and grace from you, all the day
Shelter with fire, our voices we raise still higher
God give us peace and grace from you, all the day through

Two months after that we finally packed up the big, yellow moving truck that we affectionately called Banana Boat and headed out west. This road, as it turns out, is "the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

thirty days of thirty years: twenty-seven

Year twenty-seven, age twenty-six: September 2008-2009.

Just before my birthday this year I signed a lease for a second year in my flat in Dogtown and I took in two roommates: brother and sister kittens from a farm in Indiana. I wasn't worried about being perceived as a cat lady because the true definition of a cat lady, in my opinion, is someone who will decline to hang out with people just to hang out with her cats and that was not and never will be me, so help me God. Maximus-- Max for short-- and Stella were the cutest things I think I have ever seen and I am pretty sure I will love them until the day I die.

During this year I was still waiting tables and by this time I had gotten over feeling ashamed of it. When I first started years before, my dad told me that I was "flushing [my] degree down the toilet." And it would bother me when I would be serving a table and we would start chatting and someone would say something like, "what else do you do?" or "what's next for you," as if it weren't a suitable job for a capable, intelligent young lady.

By this time I had come to realize that being a server was one of the most suitable jobs there could possibly be for me. I had realized by this point that I was gifted in the area of service and that serving food was actually a really fulfilling way for me to serve people. I had come to love and appreciate dining experiences as a way for people in our culture to gather in order to celebrate or mark an occasion or turn a friend or stranger into a companion. I even loved serving individuals who seemed to have some quiet sense of personal satisfaction from dining alone and savoring every last bite in silence. I also loved that my job provided quite a bit of autonomy and that every day and every table was different. I loved that the flexibility in my schedule allowed me to travel an extraordinary amount and to shop for groceries in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, when fewer people were crowding the isles and parking lots. I loved learning about culture and hospitality and even culinary skills from being in restaurants. I really loved my job and I loved the sense of personal fulfillment that I got from such a simple life.

For my birthday I planned a little camping trip about 40 minutes from where I lived. St. Louis has a surprising amount of natural beauty just outside the city. I called it the "Celebration of Life Camping Trip," which kind of sounds cheesy, I know, but I thought it was appropriate because being out of doors was my favorite way to celebrate being alive. Then about a week or so later I showed up for this engagement party that my friend, Liz, was throwing for our friends Casey and Angela and when I walked through the door a bunch of people were already there and they yelled, "Surprise!" I am not kidding when I say that it took me a good minute and a half of standing there, just looking around, to realize that it was a surprise birthday party for me.

A couple weeks later I started seeing a counselor. I had been thinking about it for a long time but had only then pulled the trigger. I felt like I had some stuff to unpack and, really, I think everybody's got stuff to unpack and could benefit from talking things through with a counselor. There is a seminary in St. Louis that has a counseling program and you can see one of the graduate students for free, which helps you and helps them complete their required hours to become certified, so I took advantage of that.

The first visit I told my counselor that I felt weird about being there because my friends had just had this great party for me and I was feeling pretty good. I didn't know at the time to tell her that I generally felt insecure and that sometimes I got kind of depressed. But I kept going once a week for a couple months and she had me do a couple things to help guide my thoughts, but mostly I just talked about what was going on and eventually she was able to give me feedback from her observations. I cannot say exactly what lessons I took from that experience but I know that it helped me to sort through the mess of thoughts that were tangled inside my head.

In the springtime of my twenty-seventh year I met this guy at a film festival. We had mutual friends and we knew of each other but we didn't shake hands until intermission that night. Then the next week he showed up at one of these parties that my friend, Liz, and I had for single people every-other week called, Gin Bucket Thursdays. He stayed until the very end and I could tell that he was waiting around to ask me out but Liz had asked me to stay around after so she could talk to me about this guy she was kind of starting to date. Finally it got awkward so Nate left. Liz talked to me about what was going on with her and then she said, "I think Nate was waiting around to ask you out." I said, "yeah, I know." She asked me what I thought about that and I said I was up for it because it would probably be fun, because I liked talking to him. She apologized for keeping me around and preventing him from asking me out but I said, "If he wants to ask me out, he'll ask me out."

Two weeks later he asked me out in the middle of a conversation about something completely unrelated, with our friend, John, sitting right there. I was happy to say yes, and I glanced over at John as he took a bite of a cracker and just looked straight ahead. Our first date was on Cinco De Mayo, which I thought was so fun, and we were pretty much smitten from that point on. And still are.

thirty days of thirty years: twenty-six

Year twenty-six, age twenty-five: September 2007-2008.

I spent my twenty-fifth birthday in Dogtown, which is the neighborhood in St. Louis where I lived. I rented this little, one bedroom flat next door to a bar and just across from the St. Louis Zoo and Forest Park, which is to St. Louis what Central Park is to New York. Words cannot express how much I loved that place.

I worked at this fancy restaurant in downtown Clayton for a few months but I hated it because it was so poorly ran and the computer system was so archaic that I felt unprepared to do my job well. That, and I kind of felt like the owners stole money from the servers in roundabout ways. It was almost a moral decision to quit more than anything. It took me a little more than a month to find another job because I was so determined to make it a good one.

Just before I went home to Kansas City for Christmas that year I made a significant life choice: I got a tattoo. I had been thinking about it for more than a year, things like what it would be and where I would put it. Generally, I feel like the only reason a person should get a tattoo is for him- or herself. Because there is always going to be somebody who disapproves or dislikes it and because you will live with it for the rest of your life, you have to be able to stand by your decision and it has to be able to give you and only you a sense of its purpose.

My tattoo kind of looks like the Timberland brand logo from a distance or with an unfamiliar eye. It is a circular-shaped silhouette of a tree with roots next to a stream of water. I had been looking for an image of a really good looking tree for a while, and then one day I was at this meeting for the church I was going to at the time and the guy across from me was drinking coffee from a mug with a tree on it. I said, "that is a good looking tree." I asked him about the mug and it turned out to be the logo for the church before they changed the name from Greentree to Riverside. He said they had a bunch of those mugs that they couldn't get rid of because of the name thing, so he offered to give me about a half-dozen of them. I took one and a couple weeks later I brought it with me to the tattoo shop.

I picked this particular tattoo shop because one day I saw this lady sitting across from me at a Bread Co. (which is the same thing as Panera, but in St. Louis it is still called the St. Louis Bread Co.) and I thought she had beautiful tattoos. I eventually went over to her and asked her not to think I was weird for asking but, "where did you get your tattoos done?" It turned out that her husband was an artist at one of the more reputable shops on the Loop, so that's how I made my decision. The artist ended up really liking the tree, too, so I gave him the mug.

So I got this little tattoo on the inside of my wrist, mostly because I wanted to be able to see it every day and I liked how people could see it well when I served them plates of food, and at the same time I can easily cover it with a bracelet or watch if I need to. I love it so much and for a while after I got it I had these reoccurring dreams where it got erased, so I would wake up with a gasp and check to make sure it was still there.

Most people who see my tattoo guess that it is the tree of life. I usually say, "yeah, kind of." The thing is that it doesn't mean just one thing to me, it is a symbol of many deep truths. The origin of the name Ashley stems from the ash tree, so the tree is kind of like me. And the most common explanation that I give when people ask about it is that it is from a passage in Jeremiah 17 in the Bible that says this:

Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, who's confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

It's a reminder of who I want to be.

At the beginning of 2008 I started working at this great, very well-run restaurant in the Lafayette Square neighborhood of St. Louis. I was still traveling a lot, including trips with my new friend, Liz and that summer I got to lead a backpacking trip with my brother and an awesome group of high school students from Kansas City. We actually spent a week in the wilderness that is just miles from where I live now.

Liz and I attended this house group with the church where we both went. One day our group was having a discussion and I chimed in with some statement about how I think that a lot of guys-- Christian guys, to be exact-- seem to be put-off by strong, single women. About five minutes later Liz came up to me and asked if we could get coffee sometime.

So she and I would lament to one another about the woes of being intense and "intimidating," to the opposite sex and then we would spur one another on toward further bad-ass-ness. We would travel together and find adventure and talk on the phone and eat at delicious restaurants.

St. Louis was probably the easiest place for me to make friends since college, where it is easy for everyone to make friends because you are thrown into close proximity with a bunch of people in the same life stage for a significant length of time. There is so much to be said about the good, genuine people of the Midwest, and the neighborhood feel of the city of St. Louis. After my first year in that city I had made several friends and no two were alike. It was an easy decision for me to stay another year.

thirty days of thirty years: twenty-five

My twenty-fifth year of life, 2006-2007, I did one of the most random things I have ever done: I moved to Chattanooga, TN.

In August my dad helped me load everything I owned into the same 1976 Caprice Estate station wagon that we used to take our family vacations in, and he moved me to southeastern Tennessee. Oh, it was terrible because he kept getting flat tires, which meant that we had to unload half my stuff from the back onto the side of the highway in order to access the spare in the side-panel. And then there was the pit-stop in Metropolis, IL-- the home of Superman, if you don't know-- where we spent a few hours getting something fixed under the hood. I will say that we got some awesome pictures from that trip, though.

I had befriended a couple people from Chattanooga during my internship year at Frontier and the following year I had visited the town a couple times. I thought it was one of the most charming places I had ever been and to this day I say that I like everybody I have ever met from there.

I basically went to Chattanooga because I liked the town and people and I was ready for something new. But officially I was there to go to Grad school. I did take some classes toward getting my masters in physical education, but soon enough I realized that there were too many politics in education for my taste. That and I didn't love it. So about a year after I arrived, when my roommate was getting ready to move out, I had to decide if I wanted to stay longer and get a new place or if it was time to leave. I decided to leave

Even though I love the city of Chattanooga and the people and there is something about the eastern time zone that just works well with my internal clock, that was one of the hardest years of my life. I had people around me but I found it very difficult to connect with most of them on a personal level. It felt like I was this new kid on the playground and I was walking around every day asking, "can I play?" 

I don't mean to knock the south because I can go on about how I loved it, but I found that the whole cliche about southern hospitality left something to be desired when it came to newcomers. I felt like people would say all the time things like, "Let's get together," or, "I'll have you over," and it rarely happened. Most of the people I really connected with there were transplants from somewhere else. 

So I put myself out there a lot and I did do a significant amount of dating but a lot of times I would go do things by myself. Every week, for example I would go to church and then to the Farmer's Market, which ended up being one of my favorite things in the city. I did a lot of walking into downtown and Coolidge Park via the pedestrian bridge and spend many nights at one coffee shop or another. I will say that the thing I probably value most about that year was my quality solitary time.

Some of the best writing I have ever done came out of my year in Chattanooga. I poured myself out into my journal and onto my blog. I found that I experienced this odd breed of friendship that came with people I kind of knew from real life, in college or something, where I would read their stuff and they would read mine and we connected on a deeper level because of it. Paper-- or computer screen or whatever-- has always been the most patient ear for me to pour myself out to and I have found in my life that whenever I have fewer people around to hear me, I speak less and write more. 

So when I was thinking about moving or staying I emailed some of my best girl friends to ask for their advice. I told them that they knew me and I was only confusing myself so I needed to hear them speak to me and help me understand what I needed to do next. One of my friends, Amy, wrote back and told me to "quit with the Lone Ranger stuff." She was right. I had spent the last couple years moving about every six months or so and I shouldn't have been surprised by the gypsy that looked back at me in the mirror every day. So I did what I though I would have done a couple years before: I moved to St. Louis, MO. 

St. Louis is where most of my best friends lived and it was a lot closer to my family and it seemed right. So my dad, as loving and supportive as ever, came the 700 miles back down to Chattanooga from Kansas City with his station wagon, loaded up my stuff one last time and moved me to a place I could finally put down roots. 

thirty days of thirty years: twenty-four

Year twenty-four age twenty three: September 2005-2006.

I spent my twenty-third birthday in Boston with my sister, Becky, which is the only time I have ever been there but it was a lovely city. After my internship at Frontier Ranch I traveled for about a month, mostly with friends from that year. Within that month I saw the sunset over the Pacific Ocean and the sunrise over the Atlantic; from San Diego, California to Portland, Maine and many, many places in between. 

After that time I moved in with my brother in Kansas City. For a very brief time I worked as a personal trainer but then I realized my unofficial title would be salesperson, so I quit. I wanted so badly to go back to Colorado, but I felt like I needed to have a good reason. I tried to go anyway, after leaving the fitness club, but I just did not have the confidence to start from scratch. I don't know where it came from, this need to have to always be able to explain myself, but it would haunt me even into premarital counseling with my husband. One glorious and surprising gift from this time was that I had many solid and genuine phone conversations with some dear friends who loved me too much to give me answers but gave me unconditional support and encouragement, instead. 

So, like I said, I moved back to Kansas City and worked as a server in this restaurant that my uncle's tennis buddy owned. It was a half-hour commute and many people wondered why I wouldn't just get a job closer to my house, but one of the things I dislike most about going home is bumping into people from high school. 

I don't remember if it was this year or later but one time I bumped into an old friend at the store and he told me about how he was getting his MBA and working at some fancy place downtown, or something. When I told him I was waiting tables he said, "well, it happens." Just like that. As if my job was a pile of poop in the street that I had stepped into by accident. When I bump into people from high school I always feel like I have five minutes or less to explain each of my personal or career choices in such a way that they will judge me as successful rather than not, and I hate that. Because, let's be honest, it's not like we don't really want people to judge us, we just don't want them to judge us negatively. 

After about six months in my hometown I accepted a position to work with my friend, Natalie, from college. She was directing this day camp run by the Navigators and I would be working as a counselor alongside several college students, getting paid a hundred dollars a week. The thing about this job, though, was that it would get me back out to Colorado and I got to live next door to the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. I may have been poor, but I was in prime real estate.

Fortunately, I had Natalie and this hippie sort of girl about my age who surprised me by becoming one of my most beloved friends, even to this day. One day Molly, my new friend, and I were riding our bikes together through the Garden. We started cruising down this steep hill and all of a sudden this little chipmunk darted out in front of me, then back a bit, then back in front of my tires to meet its death. That's right, I ran over a chipmunk with my bike. I started screaming the instant I felt the thud, and so did Molly, who was right behind me. Then we stopped at some look-out and she opened up to me about life and loneliness and that's when I really knew that I had friended-up again.

It was at about this point in life that I really started examining the idea of waiting. I went through phases when I was embarrassed to admit that I was waiting for anything but the reality was that I went through years of waiting; for what, I don't exactly know. Maybe I was waiting for a husband but that wasn't all. I was waiting for a lot more than that and all I knew was that I would recognize it when I saw it.

I found in a journal or blog recently that it was around this time, maybe a year earlier, when I first penned the words, "waiting is not a passive thing." That became another mantra in my life and that is one of my favorite things to tell people when I recognize the symptoms in them: confusion, discontentment with their present state, a crossroad of possibilities before them, the simultaneous presence of hope and fear. I think people need to know that it is okay to wait because waiting is just as significant a time in someone's life as anything else. Because a lot of life happens while you wait.

I wonder if most people, if given the chance to really think about it, would choose waiting or floating mindlessly. Because I think that a lot of people go through life mindlessly on auto-pilot because they have reached some false-peak, rather than waiting for the real thing. I don't mean to judge and I am not thinking of anyone in particular, but all I know is that our days are made up of incessant decisions coming at us and that it is easy to arrange it so that we just do the same thing every day based on some decisions we made one day long ago. Even if a girl doesn't know what she is waiting for, I think that waiting is a heroic action.

When I think back on this year I remember people being very excited for me while I was generally scared. I remember saying a lot that choosing one thing means giving up everything else, and feeling that conviction to wait for the right thing. It turns out that life is not so short that you cannot chose different things at different times and I wish I knew to chill out a bit more back then. But during this time I learned the other key ingredient in waiting: active resistance. I feel like it was okay for me to not move out to Colorado if the time was not right for me, or to pass up the opportunity to make more money so that I could have a more fulfilling experience. A lot of the time, waiting means turning down some opportunities so that you are available to take the right one at the right time. In hindsight, I had a lot more time than I thought I did but I learned to give myself a little breathing room and to look at the decisions flying at me every day like they could actually change my life for the better.

thirty days of thirty years: twenty-three

Year twenty-three, age twenty-two: September 2004-2005.

In August of this year I arrived at Frontier Ranch. I like to tell people that I lived in a log cabin on the side of a mountain, and that is when it happened. In 1996, the first time I stepped foot on the grounds of Frontier Ranch, I said to myself, this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The second time, in 2004, I said to myself, this is where I belong.

I could write a book about my experience that year, and in fact I just might, but not tonight. That was my first experience with really leaving my comfort zone and walking leaping into the unknown. I didn't want to miss a minute of that year, and I don't think I did.

I spent a day of solitude in Santa Fe, hiked a fourteener and met a celebrity. I survived a windstorm at the Great Sand Dunes and wrestled alligators. I worked in a metal shop in the Dominican Republic and stood up at my best friend's wedding. I watched a Better Than Ezra Concert outside while it snowed in Vail and went skydiving over Boulder. I got to work behind the scenes to create one of the most magical events in all of Young Life camping: Tableau night. I cleaned probably every toilet at Frontier Ranch and every time I would make the bed where I slept all those years before, I was overcome with joy and gratitude.

When I arrived at Frontier Ranch I was somewhat closed off and afraid. But at one point during the year my mentor, Angie, told me that although I experience a lot of fear, I do not let fear stop me. She was right and therein lie both one of my greatest weaknesses and greatest strengths. It's funny how they life in the same place inside me, like two conflicting roommates.

It was during this year-- on New Year's Eve, to be exact-- that I began one of my most favorite traditions: instead of making a New Year's resolution, I come up with one word that describes how I want to grow and be changed in the next year. That year my word was transparent. I wanted for the walls I built with fear to be seen as glass, straight through to the real me.

At the end of the year Angie made each of us girls something that cost her something. For me, she made a patchwork quilt. Patchwork quilts are meant to tell a story and while there were small stories within some of the fabrics, the larger story that it told was that it, like me, went from darkness to light. I don't know how, but I opened up that year.

One of the things you'll hear me say all the time, if you know me long enough, is that some of the greatest things in life are also the hardest. I think it was in that year that I started saying that, because it was definitely one of the hardest years of my life and also one of the greatest.

Pretty early on, when I was feeling stretched beyond what I thought I could bear, I took this on as my mantra: if the Lord chooses to change me, then I must consider myself blessed. When I am in community and friction happens, God could change someone else and leave me here where I am, but I'm not interested in staying the same day after day and year after year. In life you cannot control what you can't control, especially other people and how they respond to you. Sometimes, when something's gotta give, it needs to be you and even though it might feel like losing at first, that's almost always the best thing that ever could have happened.