Patience, Young Grasshopper

I started graduate school four years ago.

I started on a whim after COVID, after spending a year mostly inside. Before that, I had already been in a long process of rebuilding myself after my marriage ended in 2017, almost a decade of weaving that life back together in different ways, not all of them linear or clean.

Learning to date and be in relationships again felt like a kind of trial by fire. Or maybe more like accidental exposure therapy, just repeatedly stepping into situations I was not fully prepared for and figuring it out as I went.

Ever know you need to heal more but just want it to happen instantly? Yeah. Me too.

My eternal lesson seems to be, “Patience, young grasshopper.”

It has also felt like a kind of leap of faith. Like standing at the edge of something and not fully seeing what is below, but stepping anyway. Or like realizing you might have to move your own mountain instead of waiting for it to move for you. Mustard seeds and all of that, if you know what I mean.

Then COVID hit. The Universe basically yelled, “pause.”

Everything slowed down right when I was starting to regain momentum. It felt like a year-long Groundhog Day, like an instant replay in slow motion.

You ever feel like you are carrying the weight of everything happening around you, all the curveballs and changes, but not fully registering it in real time?

Maybe that is just how it feels from the inside.

My lesson through all of this has been patience, but not the passive kind. The kind where you keep moving one step at a time, even when you cannot see the shape of where it is going yet.

I have kept mantras on my front door throughout this: “I think I can, I think I can.” (Thomas the Tank Engine.) “Just keep swimming.” (Finding Nemo.) Small instructions for moments when I did not fully trust my own ability to keep going.

A lot of what I have learned about myself has not come from insight in real time, but from continuing forward, even when I could not yet see what was changing, and only later realizing what was actually happening.

If I try to make sense of it now, I keep coming back to integration, even if I do not always name it that way. In hindsight, it is the way different versions of myself are still in conversation with each other, still becoming part of the same ongoing process.

After lockdown, I started volunteering more in the queer community. I joined the board of PACE (People Acting for Change and Equality), a nonprofit LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, as technology officer in January 2022, and I started graduate school in June 2022. My work there has included designing graphics, managing the website, and handling social media and email communications.

And then, over time, life kept expanding in multiple directions at once. Graduate school. Counseling training and work. Activism and advocacy. Protests. Ongoing shifts in rights and protections for women, queer people, and communities of color. Friends coming into my life and leaving it. Relationships forming, changing, dissolving. Loss of friends and family, loved ones. Grief layered into everything else, quietly but constantly.

Somewhere along the way, I also started sharing my writing more openly. For years, it mostly lived in notebooks, drafts, and private corners of my life. During this time, I started publishing some of my work, finished a poetry manuscript, and started this blog. Looking back, that feels like its own leap of faith. Letting people read what I had spent years keeping to myself.

In the middle of all of that, I also made a change that has mattered quietly but significantly. I stopped drinking alcohol. It was never central in my life, but when it was present, whether in me or around me, it tended to bring a kind of chaos I no longer wanted to participate in. I have been sober from alcohol for a little over a year now.

So here is what I have learned since starting graduate school:

Patience, above all else, but not the passive kind. The kind that asks you to act before you feel ready and trust that clarity comes later.

That courage is often just movement without certainty.

That empathy is one of my strongest traits, but it only stays sustainable when I learn how to set boundaries that are stronger than my openness.

That grief does not resolve cleanly. It shifts shape, returns in seasons, and becomes something you learn to carry differently rather than finish.

That time shows itself in the body in ways I did not expect. Fatigue, aches, small signs of years passing faster than I notice.

That mindfulness is not about controlling emotion, but about staying present enough to feel it without abandoning myself inside it.

That four years is not long until I look back and realize how many versions of myself lived inside it.

That I do not have to fit into any box I created for myself, or that others offered me when they were trying to understand me.

That the people who are meant to stay tend to reveal themselves over time, and I can learn to accept that without resentment.

I can feel now how much was happening at once, even if I am still in it. Still on the journey, still learning how the pieces fit together as they come into view. This weaving has taken almost a decade now, and it is still unfolding.

And still, I move forward.

And still, I return to this:

All you can do is all you can do, and all you can do is enough.