My friend Shannon is in town from Richmond, expanding her yoga instruction credentials in a 30-hour program that her trainer happened to be hosting at a studio in town. She’s known me since I was 17, through my brother and his business partner (who is now her husband), and I lived with her while getting on my feet my first month in Richmond.
Shannon’s six years my senior and has had a pretty clear (if not firsthand) view of my life from teenage years into thirty and — it’s really striking me, this, for having not previously considered it— she is one of very few human beings whose insights I take with far more than just a grain of salt.
While it helps that those morsels of perspective come from a place that is well-aligned with my own world views, more importantly they come from one of the few people who (both inadvertently and through intention) I know knows me and the full scope of my life experiences thus far.
I went from “hey, cool, yes of course you can stay with me but I need to tell you [all of the things going on] and I’m leaving town the same day you depart so I might be stressed but you can take my car at any point and…” to “holy shit, THANK YOU for being here to close out my twenties with your unfiltered perception and the kinds of doubtless encouragements that I typically only get from myself.”
I’m record-breakingly far from my usual levels of stress and introversion for a time like this / following a rocky month. I even got out and helped friends with a move while she was in class, after feeling certain last week that this weekend I’d be hermetic, stressed, and scrambling around my apartment in preparation for travel and a move-out.
It’s been some cool days. I’m amped to return to the northeast.
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