Cat grass. the BobCat likes to eat plants, so I planted some just for him, that are safe for him to eat.

I’ve been doing a bit of navel gazing. About growing and changing and how that impacts friendships but also how that impacts how I understand myself. Earlier tonight I sent a text message to someone who was once very close to me; a friend that I had not had any contact with in at least a year, and had not had a real conversation with in double that amount of time. I recently found out that he had become a father and was devastated–not by the birth of his son–but by the fact that our once tightly knit friendship had deteriorated so far. He responded to the text message with one of his own, and then a phone call. The call was somewhat awkward; he only had a short break in his schedule to chat and neither of us seemed to really know where to start to fill in the missing information. Eventually we were laughing over an event that happened nearly eight years ago, one that involved an epic case of stubborn on my part. As we laughed about it, I assured him that my stubborn streak is still alive and kicking and he laughed and told me he couldn’t imagine me any other way. Eventually we both made promises that we’d continue to try to reconnect and hung up the phone.

Our conversation got me to thinking about the struggle I’ve gone through in the past few years to understand myself as the person I am now. One morning I seemed to awake and find myself happily married but unhappy with my graduate program of study, and generally unable to get out of my own way because of anxiety and depression. I had no idea how to interact with the person I was, the person whose goals had changed from “career driven workaholic person with a PLAN” to “happily married and mostly domestic with no idea what I want to spend my life doing.” I thought that my major struggle was because I had fundamentally changed as a person but I realized tonight that that was not the case. Instead, my struggle was with accepting the person I’ve always been. I’m not as stubborn as I used to be, I try to think more carefully and speak less hastily (although I still have an awful lot to say) but it’s taken me a long time to realize that this Bon, the one I am today, has always been there. She was just overshadowed by the Bon I thought I needed to be. It’s nice not to feel trapped by a box of my own making anymore, there’s a lot more room for me to grow.