Quarantired of Waiting

Hello, my dear friends!

I have decided to revive this blog in the interest of reigniting my love of prose.  (No better time to reflect and ruminate than while sheltering in place during an international pandemic, right?)  Somewhere along the line, I allowed the joy of writing to slip from my grasp and nearly vanquish.  I could blame this on the lack of personality in most legal papers or on my introduction to the "real" or "adult" world of working all day and striving to find purpose at night.  You know, people say you shouldn't allow work to define you, but that's pretty tough when the first question strangers ask you at social gatherings is, "What do you do?"

Indeed, what do I do?  Lately, outside of my profession, it is primarily slumping on the couch and rewatching Parks and Rec.  Now that I am no longer in school, I seem to have less to look forward to.  No more learning new subjects in an attempt to discover my passion and no more clinging to the hope that I will figure everything out by the time I graduate.  I'm here, I've graduated, and I'm still lost.

It's never easy to feel completely at home with yourself, no matter how old you are or how much introspection you've practiced.  Sometimes your own mind can feel like a foreign habitat.  Every now and again, I still get glimpses of past loves, losses, successes, and struggles, and I wonder how this person I once knew so well could have changed so fast.  

To be sure, my core self remains the same: shy but silly, intellectual but childish, anxious but cheerful.  But the level of comfort I feel with those traits differs--and some of my more problematic qualities have become more pronounced.  For example, my raging perfectionism urges me to make my reentrance into the blogging world spectacular and flawless.  Perhaps that's why I haven't posted in four years--I've felt as though I've had nothing important to say for a long time.  I've felt like a drone in the working world.  In fact, I'm so used to billable hours that I find myself mentally calculating whether the time I've spent writing this post has been efficient.

I miss the innocent, curious Amanda from time immemorial.  I miss my college friends who made me feel whole.  I miss our philosophic discussions in the library stacks or random classrooms at midnight on Friday nights.  I miss our human pyramids and our spur-of-the-moment fashion shows.  I miss dressing up like a dude with my best friend and attending a student drag show.  I miss discovering all of these crazy new things I enjoy.

Equally as satisfying as discovering new interests, however, can be rediscovering old ones.  And if I'm writing this, right here, right now, I think I'm nearly back.  Maybe I won't be composing twenty-page essays on all the ways COVID-19 has changed humanity for good anytime soon, but the important thing is I just wrote six paragraphs about my feelings--my raw, unabashed feelings.  That's a pretty good start.

'Til the next six paragraphs,
Amanda :)

Faux fur jacket: Michael Kors.  Necklace, top, and boots: J. Crew.  Pants: Ann Taylor.

All photos thanks to the incomparable Sean Su!