Wellness with Makalah

Ah, the joys of writing my first “real” blog while feeling the sun on my face, a mountain in my view, my best friend reading her book alongside me, and my doggo laying under a tree nearby. Moments like this remind me how lucky I am to enjoy being alive. The simplest things bring me the most joy – my heart is exploding with gratitude for the changes that brought me to this exact place at this exact time at this exact moment. I will never be able to articulate how lucky I feel to be who I am in this chapter of my life.

So, who am I? A question as old as time. I have been asking myself this for as long as I can remember. A few years back, I started writing weekly journals to my future kids. It started out as a way of remembering all of the life lessons that I would want them to learn; however, it has since become something so much bigger for me (highly recommend doing this, even if you start now!).

I took a jog down memory lane and recently read a few of my old excerpts from 2019, 2020, and 2021. I realized how much truly changes with time. Time passes and you don’t always recognize who you were back then versus who you are now until you see it written down. 21 year old me thought I was getting married. 22 year old me thought that I was worthless because of a shattering heartbreak. 23 year old me felt incompetent in her career. 24 year old me felt the onset of grief for the first time. 25 year old me found something she had been looking for since puberty: self worth. Maybe it was my frontal lobe fully developing or being fed up with feeling inadequate, who really knows?

I defined self worth in my own eyes and my world suddenly lit up. I spent a lot of my life wondering what “love” looked like. I never conceptualized self love until I realized I had never had it/learned what it was. I find that the “love yourself – be who you are – self love” concept has really taken off, and can sometimes come off as trendy or dare I say *easy*. Therefore, I don’t want to go that route with this, but rather acknowledge that grasping an understanding of self love can be incredibly difficult. It means that you will consistently be growing, shifting your mindsets, reflecting on who you have been and who you want to be, and working on parts of yourself that you would rather ignore are there.

For instance, something silly that up until last year I loved to pretend that I was not insecure about, was gaining weight in college. When I stopped playing volleyball and didn’t quite know how to take care of myself from there, I let a lot of things go, one of those being my physical well being. In 2020 I wrote, “Who would want to be with someone like you anyways?” and as I reread those words today, all I wanted to do was hug her. How silly of me to define myself in a way that was so hateful when I now know that I am the one who can love myself completely. Not even I wanted to be with me, and not wanting to live in your own body is a feeling that only those who have felt it can relate to (eep, vulnerable moment, but it’s important to be myself here!)

Each time I have been on the mountain this week I have disconnected for the hike up, meditated at the top, and on the way down, all of my thoughts regarding the above would flood in. I had an abundance of time as I hiked Camelback and Piestewa mountains to their peak, (totals 3,000ft in elevation gain!), meaning the thoughts were plentiful! The thoughts stemming to: how lucky I feel to be alive, feeling as if I have grown so much, remembering moments of insecurity, asking why I was replaceable, feelin the feelies – there is simply nothing quite like mountain air to clear your headspace I can tell ya that.

Before I make this embarrassingly too long, I think I initially began writing this with a different narrative than what it is turning out to be. Classic mak squirrel mode activated.

To conclude and answer the initial question I posed myself, who am I? I don’t know. I think I am full of a lot of things, and that there is more I will continue to become. I am ever changing. I do know I am independent, loyal, compassionate, warm, silly, beautiful, full of light & faith, challenging, stubborn, overwhelming, adaptable, resilient, and most of all, me.

I am so me and I love her so much. There are not many environments in which I will not be myself, and I love that I have become so comfortable in my own skin that you will always get the same Makalah. A refreshing feeling to have. All in all, I type this in hopes that I read this one day with so much happiness, because I am writing it from the place of loving who I am.

p.s. me to me at a later date: go do some yoga girl, get outside for 30 minutes, drink some water, climb a mountain or lift heavy weights, text someone you love them, read sad poems in the bath, remember how cool you are, paint something, play the guitar, do volleyball (if ur knees still can?), let what is in the past stay in the past.

xoxox, with love, makalah marie