Evolve or remain.

It's so cool to sit here and write this post from a place, both emotionally and physically, that I didn't even think to be possible this time last year. So much has changed for me since the first day of my junior year. There's been so much growth. So much progress. I'm so much happier than I was a year ago today.  If you had told me this time last year that my job would require me to be up, dressed, and out the door by 7 a.m., I probably would've cried. So I guess I'm walking proof that things can change a little quicker than we tend to believe. I live for what I do now, and for mornings- but mostly for sunrises. I love those sky colors and quiet drives while the air is still cool and traffic doesn't exist quite yet. That's when I get a lot of my most genuine writing done. Maybe it's because I'm still groggy and the anticipation of waiting to find out what the day will hold fuels the creative part of me. Maybe it's because that's rea...

It's 6:52 a.m., and the maintenance man for my apartment building has just smiled at me and told me to have a great day at work. He's never seen me or spoken to me before. He doesn't know my name. He doesn't know what I do. And he doesn't have to . What he does know is the important stuff- that it's 6:52 a.m. on a Friday, and there's still dew on the grass from the chill of the night, and that the littlest efforts towards a human connection matter. You don't have to know people to be kind to them. It's 7:15 in the morning now and there's a young girl standing on the corner waiting for the bus. I can't help but wonder where she's going or who she's meeting. I wonder why she's alone. I wonder how far she walked to get there. I wonder what obscenely early hour she must've been up at, or if she even slept at all. I wonder if anyone has made her feel happy yet today, and doubt it by the way she keeps her head down and seems to be...

Okay yeah, I can't lie to you. I wouldn't lie to you. Writing isn't something I particularly love. The process is interesting and discovering myself more with every piece of work is humbling, but there's more to it than just that.  I think there are things that you need to understand about me and where I'm coming from before that makes any sense at all to you, so I'll lay it all out here now. I don't write for the sake of pleasing an audience, which tends to confuse most everyone. I don't write to gain followers or increase my page views. I don't write in an effort to be praised or critiqued.  Obligations and debts are dead to me here. I don't have anyone to answer to here. I speak my mind without interruption here and this is where I don't have anyone trying to argue with me or tell me how they would do it differently. This is where I don't have to listen to anyone try to convince me that writing is a waste of my time or a nonsense us...

Several weeks ago I sat down to work on one of these posts from my bedroom floor for the last time... and didn't know it. Several weeks ago, I couldn't hear echos coming back to me from the same walls that had been stuffed with the last 11 years of my wild little life. Several weeks ago I HAD to be sitting on my floor to get any writing done because my desk was overflowing with homework assignments, poetry drafts, half-full nail polish bottles and the Ibuprofen tablets that kept me standing through the toughest semester yet in terms of my mental health.  Things are a little bit different now.  My room is empty. There aren't clothes in the closet anymore, or artwork on every wall, or twinkle lights across the top of the curtains. There aren't yesterday's shoes in the corner and there's no smeared mascara on the pillowcases. There aren't loud guinea pig squeals coming from it anymore. It's clean, and quiet, and you can hardly tell that it hosted mor...

"I have way too much that I really need to get done," I JUST said to myself, as I'm sitting down writing this, ignoring all of it. It's too much to ask for my creativity to hit me in waves at convenient hours, it turns out, so here we are. Welcome back. I've been keeping quiet for a while so I'm warning you now, I've got a lot to say. My focus lately has been entirely on my peace of mind and my journey of self-preservation, but I'm finding that I'm finally ready to tell you about it. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In the last two weeks, I've removed 4,000+ people from my social media. I've been unfollowing, unfriending, and disconnecting entirely from THOUSANDS of people and pages that were destructive to my mental health for one reason or another. It doesn't make sense to me to keep people around if we're not actively engaged in one another's lives. If we're not checking in wit...

I know very little about being a parent, but I do know that nothing in this world is going to stop me from being the best mother I can be for you. From the minute I learn of your existence, you will be my reason. My reason to push myself, my reason to work hard, my reason to sacrifice, my reason to be even more careful with choosing my words, and my reason to maintain an iron spirit balanced with a gentle heart. I can't promise you an easy life. I can't promise you that you'll never cry yourself to sleep or get so drunk that you can't stand the taste of Jack Daniels from that day forward. I can't promise that the world or the people in it will always be kind to you, but I can promise a lot of things that will make it better. I'll promise them to you now, before your life begins, and I also promise I'll keep my word forever. Promises I promise to remind you that I'm proud of you. Whether it's when you bring home a straight A report card or ...

Today as I was getting off the phone with my grandma, she asked me if I'm tough, and I told her I kind of have to be. Her response was something I won't forget.  "I think Hannah Leigh Tobias is everything she needs to be." I feel like it's fair to say that that kind of closing remark, followed by an "I love you," would be comforting to anyone -- but it hit me particularly hard. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm busier than I've ever been, or maybe because of how emotionally heavy what I do tends to be, or maybe because my brain just seems to be programmed to believe that nothing I'm ever doing is good enough. Maybe because everything lately has been messy. Maybe because it's felt like I haven't had time to sit back and breathe between the long hours of classes, the three different jobs, the chores, the bills and the social plans. Or maybe it's because I just needed to hear it.  If I'm being honest, it's d...