"once you choose hope, anything is possible"

Saturday, December 28, 2013

what is this master plan anyways?

I didn't know it was possible to physically feel a heart break. I also didn't know that the pain of someone you love hurting was far greater than any pain I would ever come to know on my own. I have learned a lot in the last three years, but nothing could have possibly prepared me for the lessons I learned last night when my best friend told me that his mom lost her battle with cancer, and had passed to be in a better place without pain and suffering. We were states away and I swear with those words I felt the hole ripping through my chest. 

This year my hatred for cancer grew to heights I didn't think it would ever take. This year instead of feeling all the pain that comes with someone you know having this disease firsthand, I knew it all secondhand. This year instead of trying to convince myself that everything was going to be okay, I had to listen to my best friend lose hope and admit to me that he didn't think his mom was going to make it. That hatred and that pain far surpasses anything I have ever felt in my life, and it is something I wish so desperately I could take away. My heart aches for him. Part of me wants this pain I am feeling to go away so badly, but the bigger part of me wants to be able to feel all of his pain for him so that he doesn't have to. I want to be able to go back in time and fix it all for him. I want to be able to hold him together like my family did for me as I fell to pieces in the kitchen last night. I think that's the worst part of all of this. I know there's not a damn thing I can do to make things any better, and if there is one thing I hate more than cancer, its feeling helpless.

My whole life I have heard people tell me that God has this master plan for us, and every hardship we encounter is just preparing us for what God has in store. The last three years have been a real test of faith for me, but this week is by far the biggest one. It's so hard to leave it all up to Him when I want so badly to be able to fix it on my own. I've never been a very trusting person, and trusting someone else to care for the people I love isn't an easy task, even if it is God. I know everything is going to be okay. I am hopeful, and faithful, and I know my friend's mom is in a better place where she is no longer in pain. I know my friend is the strongest human being I know and that he has all the support he needs to get through this. I know that even though I can't see a reason behind all of this right now, there has got to be something. 

I always feel as if I need to find the answers right away. I think that has a lot to do with why I stopped writing for so long, because I was looking for the answers. The truth is, right now I don't have any answers. I know all of these things but I am really struggling to let all these truths I know become bigger than the pain I feel. I know I can't take the pain away from him, but I don't know how to trust God enough to understand that he is still going to get through this. I don't know how to make this aching in my chest go away when I know that his never will. So until I figure this all out, if I even ever do, I will continue to pray and look for the little glimpses of hope in a life that really doesn't make sense to me anymore. For those of you reading that are religious in any way please light candle or say a prayer for a family who lost a mother too soon and a young man who had to grow up far too fast. 

I know I'll see you again - this side or the other


Saturday, December 14, 2013

my year of love.


If I could choose one word to describe my year it would be love; finding my way back to love, learning to love myself, choosing to walk away from love, discovering the unconditional love that surrounds me everyday. 2013 was a year full of a lot of ups and downs for me, but through it all, love, in so many different forms, flowed constantly and kept me steady.  

I began the new year on the heels of a year full of healing. 2012 was about finding my way back to the happy go lucky, carefree teenager I was before my freshman year in college. Throughout the year I realized that even if I couldn’t go back, I was finding a new way to deal with it all and finding a new version of myself. My goal for 2013 was to take that healing, take the new Kelsey, and fall back in love with my life. Stop surviving, and start living. I went back to Marquette for my second semester of my sophomore year and things started falling back into place for me. I threw myself into dance, my sorority, being a college student and slowly the days stopped seeming endless. Everyone used to tell me that one day you would wake up and just start feeling better. I called bullshit every single time, until I did. I just woke up one day and realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I had a bad day, which in retrospect is really incredible because there was a long period of time where the dark days far surpassed the good ones. I woke up and I realized that the “new Kelsey” was someone that was so loved, and in turn found a way to love myself again, all the broken pieces included. Slowly loving life and loving myself didn’t seem like such a task, it came easy. And with that loving someone else came easy too.


As cheesy and stereotypical as it sounds, my summer was one filled with the magic of love. I got to spend the summer with my high school sweetheart, my best friend, my first love, and my other half. I spent the entire summer and beginning of my junior year filling in all the broken pieces of my heart with new memories with him. Meeting his family, going on amazing adventures, planning our futures, reminiscing on our past – we crammed it all into an amazing six months. Most of all though, he taught me to believe again; believe that love exists, that it has the power to heal, to change your life for the better and to make you question how you ever survived without it. I got to spend my year in that kind of love, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in this world. As summer turned to fall and we went back to our respective schools and lives, we both learned the harsh lesson that even the most magical love doesn’t always stand the tests of time and distance, but it doesn’t take away anything from the impact his love had on my life.


By the time the calendar hit November, love had already taken over 2013 and changed pretty much everything. The last couple months I have been pleasantly surprised time and time again when I realize how much love surrounds me everyday. I always knew I had an incredible family who loved me unconditionally, but this year I got to live with my best friends and witness their unconditional love. I took an opportunity and changed pretty much everything I had planned for my future, and when I expected everyone to tell me how crazy I was, I was met only with kindness and support. 

Who knew that in a span of 365 days love could consume my life so much? Falling back in love with my life was definitely not an easy process, but the results are unlike anything I could have imagined. It is such an incredible feeling to read my writing from this time last year and see how much things have changed, in a good way. So here’s to the last 365 days, 12 months, 52 weeks, 529600 minutes. Thanks to the people that have filled my life with so much love and taught me to love in a much better way. I can’t wait to see what 2014 has in store.