This Wasn't The Plan

Growing up my, over and over my dad would say, ‘Have a plan Emily. It doesn’t have to be a good plan, but have a plan.’

And so I did. In every situation, in every phase of life, I did.Except...this wasn’t the plan.It wasn’t the plan to be at 21 with a degree walking on next steps so shattered I should have noticed they were glass sooner.It wasn’t the plan to be estranged from some of the people who literally built a home for me with their hearts not too many years earlier.It wasn’t the plan to so soon have to reconcile my past pieces with my a confused now, and try decide how (or if) they fit together for a salvageable future. This isn’t the plan so much that I honestly feel kind of dumb.But after my dad told me to make a plan (even a bad one) he always quickly followed it with, "You can change it later if you need to...just have a plan."And I may have never had to execute that second part until now. But this is where we are. Maybe my plan was bad...maybe it wasn’t, maybe things just change and end and move and that’s okay. So here’s the plan, the new plan, the new subject-to-change-just-as-much-as-the-last-plan: I graduated. And I refuse to digress. I will carry my story beside my diploma, and say ‘This here, this is proof that I’ve learned.’ I will dig my heels into the dirt of my sadness and I will hold onto my faith, my heart, and my dignity like a life or death game of tug-of-war. I will not blame, and I will not spit on the beautiful that was, because of the painful that is. I will take each moment as a lesson of 2 Corinthians 4:18, and I will gaze into the eternal as a homing beacon for my soul. Yet I will not rush out of this here. Because if life is going to grind on me, I refuse to lessen my potential shine.Like the 12-year-old me with a rock tumbler in my basement, I always hated to wait the hours it took to make those yard rocks into shimmering stones.But I am not that little girl, and I will wait and listen to the rumbling of the tumbler, because out of it I will come more beautiful than I even know.

This is the plan. At least the first one of 2018.