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Quarter of a century

Four November’s ago I was riding around Detroit in a pink hummer limo celebrating my life. I thought that at 21 years old I had lived an entire life and I spent that birthday celebrating the Midwestern successes I was taught to be proud of: college graduation in the spring, maintaining friendships that started in adolescence, making my own car payment, etc. I thought I knew the world because I knew the ins and outs of the very small world I created for myself. Now, four years later, I look back and realize my life hadn’t even begun, that the world is infinitely larger than I could have imagined from the suburbia I grew up in. My life only began when I moved to New York. I was only beginning to test the waters of a very deep well; one full of opportunity, new friends, different cultures, delicious food, inspiration on every street corner, and for me, an endless supply of humility. New York has a way of reminding you that you aren’t shit, that your 21st birthday was merely the dusk before the dawn. There are millions of other people sharing this city with you and they’re all equally, if not more, talented than you. Likely, they worked just as hard, were just as brave and courageous, and left just as much behind in order to be here, in this city, living the life they dreamed about as children, the same way you did. So here’s to everyone who dreamed big, to myself for having 25 years worth of fight inside of me, and to all the lessons I’ve yet to learn.

-tbrumm

O

The thing about sadness is that it follows you wherever you go. It’s a part of you. There’s no bed, no city, no person that can take it out of you and you sure as hell can’t out run it. You have to hold its hand. Wrap yourself in your sadness when your cold, get to know it. Keep it close even when you’re happy. It’ll make everything that much sweeter. Once you’ve grown accustomed to it you’ll grow within it, along side it, and eventually out grow it all together. But you can’t force a square into a circle. It’s a process of transformation. Give it time.

-tbrumm

If grad school taught me one thing it is to write about what scares me. And for two years I wrote intensively about things that terrify me. I wrote about things I’ve never spoken aloud and I took a fine-tooth comb through the memories I try hardest to white out. But now it’s my feelings and my memories that have scared me out of writing, scared that once I get it down on the page it might be true and once shared it will become something to someone else and they’ll be allowed to do as they please with my many truths. It’s this kind of fear that has kept me from sharing the work I spent two years and $100,000 producing and perfecting, assuming there is such a thing as a perfect truth.

-tbrumm

Remember to let it burn

I want you to remember that your definition of happiness is not universal. That skies are not always blue, but gray can be just as beautiful. That you can never miss something you never had and to find comfort in knowing you were not, and will not always be, alone. That no taste, no smell, no sound is the same to you as it is to others and that in itself is a beautiful thing. I need you to remember how small you are, but how big your voice is. Remember that a passion burns inside of you for a handful of different things and with that you can blaze a path to a life you love waking up to. Burn, baby, burn.

 

-tbrumm