Can’t figure out if I honestly just despise this place or if I’m trying to make the best of it. 

Regardless, it truly makes you appreciate the things you had and the people you once took for granted.

I miss my old life.

I miss the old me.

Damn…

Perspective

I always love listening to people talk about things they’re passionate about.  The way they discreetly try to hide a smile when they talk about their dream job.  Or the subtle confidence in their voice when they sing alongside their guitar.  Or the way their eyes beam when they tell you how they first met their significant other.

It’s something that I wholeheartedly seek out and thoroughly enjoy, but I wouldn’t really know how to fully describe it in my own words.  After all, that passion isn’t mine, I would simply be borrowing it.  Hearing their stories and listening to their dreams, sometimes I wish I could be transferred into their world, to see their passions firsthand through their eyes and to feel what’s it like when they grasp what they love in their own hands. 

The closest I’ve ever come to understanding someone else’s passion was last summer.  I was lucky enough to be introduced to my best friend’s dream job—marine biology.  Nicknamed “Aquaman”, he brought me along on one of his research expeditions into South Padre Island Bay, a side of SPI that most tourists and Spring Breakers don’t even know exist.  There, we would be collecting sea grass samples and testing the alkalinity of the water, a pretty standard procedure according to the biologists in charge.  While it doesn’t exactly sound exciting to those of us not in the field, to Aquaman this was the future he was patiently working for, so any small piece of that dream was more than enough to put a smile on his face.

I didn’t really get it at first.  Jumping into cold, grimy waters with the smell of seagull droppings profusely violating your nostrils at 7:30 in the morning was never something I personally thought I could fall in love with, but my friend on the other hand was completely in his element.  He even smiled when a splatter of seagull poop landed on his shoulder.  It was like the bay belonged to him.  Or perhaps more accurately, he belonged to the bay.

Over the course of the expedition, I learned some random facts, such as how the most common seagrass was shoal grass and how you could eat gracilaria straight out of the water.  But I think the biggest thing I learned was understanding Aquaman’s passion the way he knew it, if at least temporarily.  

I saw the ocean through his eyes.  It was the excitement rousing up inside of me when a school of dolphins paraded alongside the airboat, something I thought could only happen watching National Geographic or Animal Planet.  It was the child-like fascination of staring down at a jellyfish, wondering where the tides would take it, time moving as slow as the current that carried it off.  It was seeing the mind-numbingly vast expanse of blues—every different shade, every different hue, every different saturation of that same color.  Just blue, everywhere you looked.  

I heard his lifelong dream through his ears.  It was the obnoxious sound of an old jet propeller launching us across a muffled lagoon, even the sound of my own thoughts being drowned out by the insatiable roar of the engine.  It was the sedative sounds of waves lapping up against the edges of the boat, like the ocean was trying to whisper a secret into my ear.  It was the yin and yang of those two sounds—the batterings of an old boat and the soothing of the sea—that brought me a sense of both invigoration and peace, fluctuating one right after another. 

I stood in the shallow waters using his legs.  A lone pillar of the earth, an island abandoned to the sea.  It was the strange fact that my legs stood on solid land, but the rest of my body seemed to be floating amidst the ocean.  And then it was fear that shot through my feet and ran across my spine when he said, “Be careful, there’s sharks around this area”.  

Maybe it was the tiny pieces of ocean that would gently crash against my face, allowing me to taste the savory mist with the tip of my tongue.  Or touching the back of a stingray with my own hand.  Or maybe I was just feeling high from too much pelican poop.  But regardless, that day I learned more about my best friend than the entire time I had known him. I had become a second-hand admirer to marine biology, to the ocean and to everything that lives inside of it.

I was fortunate enough to see a piece of my best friend’s world that he passionately lives out everyday.

Things I’m really bad at:  Treating my friends here in California like they’re my friends from home—distant, sporadic, and hard-to-reach.  

I need to give them more credit. I need to try harder. They’re good people, and I never tell them that.  I never act like it. 

First step in not giving up is to actually try. 

And I’m sure that it’s a lie. A misconception. A falsity that rivals Donald Trump’s hairpiece. 

Who says we always have to be happy? That we always need to be in a perpetual state of bliss? I don’t know why it’s deemed socially unacceptable to be sad or to be depressed or melancholy or over-thinking or even misguided. Days like these, when the world outside your window looks stark and gray, when your speakers sing nothing but Radiohead and Coldplay and The Smiths, I think we should welcome these feelings of ineptitude. Of failure. Of simply not being happy. It gives you the chance to pick yourself apart, trying to figure out what just what makes you incomplete. It gives you a moment to deconstruct, to shake the very foundations you had gotten comfortable with and try to rebuild yourself from the ground up again. It gives you the opportunity to look at the world not through rose-tinted glasses, but through a perspective that’s real, that’s wholesome, that’s honest.

Life isn’t all just goddamn rainbows and butterflies and chocolate-covered strawberries. Maybe life is just like the seasons. Some days are as bright and as warm and as enticing as a summer day, while others may be cold and empty and so silent it makes your ears start ringing just to fill the void. Not that the winter of life is so bad, it’s just… misunderstood, I think. People naturally don’t know how to be unhappy. But if you give it time, it can be an art in itself.  

There’s a certain, ironic beauty in discontentment. On these days when you feel like the world’s biggest loser, you slowly learn to take victories in small, insignificant moments. Like when you get the shower running the exact temperature you want on the first try. Or when you get all green lights on your way to work. Or when you lie down on freshly changed bed sheets. Suddenly, even these tiny pieces of satisfaction are enough to put a smile on your face, and you realize maybe the universe isn’t completely out to screw you over. And I’d like to think, with just a little bit of optimism, that eventually… eventually these tiny victories add up to something more, something better.  

You don’t know what’s good until you’ve experienced the bad. You can’t fully appreciate happiness without ever having step foot in Melancholia. You can’t be the mother-effin’ Batman without being a damned orphan first.  If you’re sad, be sad, and don’t try to convince yourself otherwise. Once you wallow around in misery for awhile, you’ll understand just how truly important it is to hold on to happiness once you find it again.