falling in love, again.

I remember the first time I picked up a racquet. A paint brush. The first time I realized what music made me want to cry because of how deeply I felt it. The very first memories of things that made me feel alive. It doesn’t take a boy to realize you know what it feels like to fall in love.

When I was three or four, my dad took me out to the tennis courts at my future high school to play for the first time. Matching tennis skirt set and sneakers, and my brand new pink, Wilson brand Maria Sharapova racquet. There’s very few things as satisfying as cracking open a can of brand new tennis balls. It pops open like an ultra-pressurized soda can, and the smell of fresh rubber hits you in the face. The first time you swing a forehand stroke and win the point, you almost can’t help but yell a little because of how gratifying it feels to win a hard-fought set. It feels larger than life. We’d go out for a few hours to practice, my dad acting as my personal ball machine and coach. He’d teach me fancy ways of picking the balls up off the court with just your foot, and let me win practice matches so that I could think I was somehow getting better than him. 

I’d sit criss-cross on the shaggy carpet in our living room and watch the greats play in all the grand slams, pretending I knew things but really just mirroring how my dad felt about the pros. Andy Roddick was never going to be as good as Roger Federer. It was a sad day when Andre Agassi retired, but he was quickly replaced in fame by Rafael Nadal (favored by my dad for also being left handed). Djokovic was young and cocky, dad was confident he’d never be better than Rafa. Serena needed to work on her court etiquette after her infamous 2009 blow up at a line judge. I just liked Maria Sharapova because I had her pink racquet.

I hated it. Failing, I mean. I loved the idea of playing tennis, but I wasn’t good and it made me mad. Even from such a young age I remember grunting in dramatic frustration every time I’d miss a simple practice shot, feeling my face turn as pink as my outfit. Dad would reassure me, toss me another ball, tell me that I couldn’t get better unless I kept trying. I don’t know if it was my own little 8 year-old-ego that made me feel like I should be better than I was, but not being good at things I wanted to be good at was haunting. 

When I started painting with watercolors, I did the same thing. I’d try and perfect my artwork, praying it would come out exactly like it looked in my head. Spend hours watching tutorial videos on Youtube to perfect my florals and pigments. When it didn’t work, I’d rip the paper apart and try again, over and over and over. But when I picked up a brush and painted something I actually felt proud of, it made the dozens of failed paintings worth it. 

I’ve fallen into this trap too many times. Finding something I love, then giving up because I don’t meet my own standard of perfection. This process of falling in love and failing has followed me around. It seems that the older I get, the more devastating the loss is. The more embarrassing the failure feels. It has made me abandon the things that bring me joy out of an illusion that I’m better off without them, but leaves an unavoidable ache that forces me to think “what if I tried again?” Inevitably I don’t, and then regret not doing it. 

I started to feel convicted of this last year, where I happened to be listening to Carrie Underwood in the car on a road trip with a friend. I grew up watching Carrie on American Idol, begging my mom to stay up late to watch it live. She’d blast ‘Blown Away’ through our TV speakers on spring days when we’d clean the house, the windows open with fresh air blowing through the living room and wooden spoon microphones to accompany our cleaning. While on this specific road trip, for a solid hour and 45 minutes from the Tulsa airport, we flew through Carrie’s entire career of hits, singing every single word. It started to get me thinking about how long it had been since I relived my childhood in this way, remembering what it felt like to roll down the manual windows in my dad’s old Mazda and sing ‘Some Hearts’ with Megs in the back seat. 

I heard someone say that much of your adulthood is relearning what it’s like to be a kid. You spend your childhood dying to grow up, begging your mom to let you shop at Justice (because that’s peak cool girl), buy your first concert ticket and stay out until 11pm, and then you hit some magical, undetermined point and decide that you’d rather go back to your younger years. Your parents talk about their glory days in high school. Your grandparents show you pictures from when they fell in love, and it's stunning to see how young they looked. You finally get to college and amidst the hours of homework you suddenly think that maybe playground days and Friday night football lights weren’t so bad. You long for the simple things that you used to know as a younger version of you.

I’ve seen this to be true for me. My years of frustration towards tennis have turned into an ache to play like I’ve never had. To go back to my days of varsity doubles, and relive a winning match. To remember what it felt like to paint for the first time and never want to stop. To read my favorite book series for the first time and become completely addicted, immersed in the plot like it was my real life. I’ve noticed that in seasons of feeling lost, I come out on the other side hungry to create again. To LIVE. 

This blog started as one of those endeavors. I had this itch to write for fun, like 2nd grade me who used to think she’d be a writer. It was actually a really bleak season of sermon writing for class my sophomore year that pushed me over the edge to start the blog. I was getting so bored of writing for school and never writing for pleasure. Always academic, and it was draining. So, as a new practice of going back to my roots of things that make me feel like ‘me’, I started writing for enjoyment. And I’m very grateful to be back online this year, because my heart needs this more than ever. 

I started painting again. I hadn’t in a long time, but last night I did. A palette of fresh watercolor paints stared back at me, and begged me to ruin the white paper sitting flat on my desk. A blank canvas. An invitation to create again; something I thought I’d exhausted my chances on. I gave away my paints when I moved to college, but they found their way back to me in the form of a Christmas gift this year from someone who knew I needed to paint more than I did. For once, I didn’t criticize my art the entire time. I felt so free. 

I decided that this is my ‘falling in love, again’ year. My year of resurrecting things I buried in an effort to remember what makes me feel alive. Pinterest, often an incredible form of free therapy and artistic inspiration, told me that “the final stage of the healing journey is becoming an artist.” That’s a really fluffy, poetic way of saying something my spirit had already been trying to get my attention about. For too long, I’ve convinced myself that ‘someday’ (whenever someday comes) is the day I’ll try again. I’ll stop being so critical of myself, stop taking myself so seriously and just do the random hobby just because I like it. But after a six month season of lackluster and drought in my life, I realized that I can’t afford to wait for perfect conditions to show up. I can’t wait until someday because if I never try, it’ll never happen. And just like my dad used to say during our little tennis dates, I’ll never get better if I never try. 

This year, I promised myself that I’d do everything I always say I miss doing. I’ve been anticipating what it will feel like to graduate, to move somewhere new and try being a real adult, and it’s overwhelming. But I want these years of my twenties to be full of living. Not waiting around, not endlessly dreaming about what I could do, but really living the way that God has designed for me to live. He has promised me life, and life ABUNDANTLY. And that kind of life demands that I find delight in the things God delights in; the things he created for me to delight in. So in this first year of figuring out my life without school (come May), I’m going to live more than I worry about living. I’m going to throw pottery even though I’m not great at it, and do workouts I actually LIKE instead of trying to be some bruh gym girl (I’ve always known deep down I’m a pilates princess), and join a tennis club when I move states just because I can, and learn to do latte art, to say yes to more things, to live FREELY.

I went to workout in the garage a few months ago, and I found my old pink racquet. It was so much smaller than I remembered. Standing there holding it, I actually felt sad. Sad that I had ever thought that tiny pink racquet was too hard, or too good, for me to learn to use as a little girl. This year, I’m buying myself a new pink racquet and I’m gonna go smash some aces.