As children, our job is to explore the world around us. We are a smooth surface with different facets to our personalities, likes, and dislikes just underneath that we eventually start to chip away. It starts simple enough. What’s your favorite color? Why? Did you like Bratz more than Barbies? Why? Which Ninja Turtle do you like more? Why? These seemingly “trivial things” we gravitate towards are essentially stepping stones to how we develop certain parts of our personalities and, more importantly, how we begin to learn things about ourselves. We are encouraged to talk about these “trivial things” to express ourselves and our joy as we connect with our peers.

And yet, there is an interesting phenomenon that happens in life where your passion and joy for “trivial things” shifts. Soon, if you’re too passionate, it is seen as an “annoyance” at best and a “red flag” at worst. So, eventually, the older we get, the more we tamp the passion down. After all, they are just “trivial things.”

Whatever it is to overthink every life decision, examine and re-examine all potential consequences and outcomes, and then decide it’s maybe better not to attempt the thing at all—that’s me. Bravery, after all, is an exhausting prospect with unknown results.

I read a statistic once that men will often apply for a job if they meet 50% of the criteria but thatwomen will only apply if they meet 80% or more. And it’s always made me wonder: What opportunities are we shutting ourselves out of just because we don’t feel ready?

In August of 2020, my grandpa, an 88-year-old man who was born as steady and sure as he’d prove to be every day of his impressive and honest life, died suddenly of a brain bleed. There was no extended illness – no winding journey toward goodbye dotted with peaks of jutting hope and longer valleys of slow grief. Sometimes death announces its arrival from far away, bouncing the sound of trumpets off the landscape of your life miles and miles before you can spot it on the horizon. But sometimes, it collides into you with such force and suddenness it leaves you dazed, blinking, and unable to recognize yourself at all.

“I don’t want to live a mundane life,” my sister said quietly over the phone.

We have been doing daily phone check-ins since her breakup. You know the kind. The kind of breakup that leaves you feeling like the very marrow in your bones has been carved out and replaced with hollow listlessness. The kind of breakup that makes you realize writing a grocery list by yourself is the loneliest experience in your life thus far. The kind of breakup that results in you ditching your life, your job, and the home you loved to live with your parents – states away – just to regain some semblance of yourself before you was lost to time.

To love.

To vacancy.

(Perhaps you did not have the latter half of this break-up experience, but you catch my drift nonetheless.)