It's Hard To Be Consistent

When someone you love gets very sick, it is hard to carry on with your normal day-to-day. 

Your heart literally aches. You can’t stop thinking about them. So you break your routines and spend as much time with them as you can.

It is way too easy to disregard our day-to-day structure when something new and emotionally intense enters our lives. It doesn’t even need to be illness; it can be a new birth, a new love, a new hobby or anything new and full of emotion. 

When my aunt got really sick these past few weeks it was overwhelming. It was my first real experience with cancer and death. I went from being the most structured human I know—I literally had every moment from 5am to 11pm on my calendar planned out—to all of a sudden having nothing on my schedule but being with her and my family. 

I used structure and consistency like a safety tether that kept me from floating away. The more structure I have, the stronger the tether, and the further I could explore into the cosmos.

When my aunt passed, my daily structure felt too rigid, so I detached from my tether and began floating into the abyss.

I stopped meditating. I stopped writing. I stopped exercising. I stopped eating healthy. I stopped doing photoshoots. I stopped it all.

I began to lose my grounding and connection to this world; I was floating away. It did not feel safe. 

Thankfully it took less than a week for me to realize I was floating untethered and I reached out to a few close friends for help. They were able to find me in the cosmos and lovingly pull me back in.

Thank you Sal, thank you Lilian, and thank you Jenn. 

It is fucking hard to stay consistent in an ever-changing world, but maybe we don’t need to. Maybe it’s okay to consciously slow down, and intentionally change our plan. 

Maybe the only constant thing we can actually hold true is our commitment to staying close to our own hearts.