All The Small Things

"You are always your biggest problem, and always your only solution."

It's the little things that add up. Rather it is something like a song that reminds you of a moment, or when you go to get a shirt out of your closet and its gone, the little things make you or break you. Today while sitting in the car on my way home from Des Moines the song Come On Get Higher came on and I had what you could call a flashbulb memory. Summer before my junior year I had just gotten out of my boyfriend of 9 months pool and we were laying in his bed talking. It was the first time I remember someone actually taking my breath away ("when you breath out and I breath in"). I could recall every detail of that moment, how the sun was coming through the windows, what his mom was cooking upstairs, and how it felt. It was that little thing in the car today that reminded me that that relationship wasn't always as bad as people want to make it seem. It is also the little things that turn you into the person you are. Who I am has been built on liberal beliefs, Christmas's sitting on the stairs waiting for presents, cereal for dinner and misunderstandings. One of my biggest misunderstandings in life is the importance of not just first times, but the importance of the following times. I generally think that once you do something once it has less meaning and therefore not as big of a deal. Like cheating, having sex, peaking on presents, or even speeding. Once the nervousness of doing anything the first time is over you can't seem to stop doing it. In the car I realized that my biggest problem, underestimating the meaning of things, is a problem no one can fix for me, it is a problem I have to fix myself. Change is a big part of life, most people use New Years Eve, birthdays, or the start of school to bring about change (or at least try to for about a week) but for me change comes with realizations. In the past year I experienced a lot of first, big ones in fact, and once it happened, once the story was finished, doing some of these things again & again with reckless abandonment didn't matter as much. I realize that yes, when people ask questions they ask stuff like "When was the FIRST time you got a speeding ticket? When was the FIRST time you had sex? When was the FIRST time you skipped class?" & so on, no one asks you about the other stuff, but just because that is all that matters to them doesn't mean that it should be all that matters to you. Today I realized that there is a time & place for everything & I have been having bad timing and reckless placement for a while with some of my decisions. I realize that love is necessary for a lot of things that I try to pretend it isn't, and that just because you did it once doesn't mean that you need to do it again. It is a hard change, a small change, but a change that will nonetheless make a difference.