Welcome back, Olivia.

Hello new school year. New hair cut. New friends. Oh and new Olivia. I am back in Memphis and I am better than ever. You know, thinking back, I haven't felt this good/healthy/awake in over a year. It is just crazy to me how I got so used to just feeling BAD, and tired, and sick. Even before the crazy diagnosis, I remember thinking in September... "you know it isn't normal for a 23 year old to go to bed at 9:30 every night and take 3 hour naps every afternoon...OR MAYBE I'M JUST IN MED SCHOOL??!?" HA! I am amazed I even had the time to sleep that much and do well first semester anyway (except that our first semester wasn't THAT bad... and it is nothing like second year, which is studystudystudy all day all the time.)

I just feel so good. So alive. So happy. So everything. It is almost overwhelming. It IS overwhelming.

Sitting in church this Sunday I became so overwhelmed with happiness I actually (silently, and rather stealthily) burst into tears during communion. You see, before, when I was sick, that is the quiet time during Mass when I would pray for God to make me whole again. For Him to cure me from the inside out and to fill me with the strength that I so desperately sought. But there I was this Sunday.  Just sitting there and feeling SO WHOLE.  Knowing that my prayers had been received and answered.

But not knowing where to go from there.

I am healthy and emotional and silly and loud and snarky and passionate. I feel like I have been given back my life, and with that, my old identity. But WHO AM I? Because I do not feel like any of the old Olivias at all. But more like a completely different and changed and affected girl. And I don't think I want to be crazy Sophomore Olivia or motherly Senior Olivia or dependent-on-boyfriend Olivia or any of the other ones that I have either forgotten or dare not share with the world. I want to be something bigger, something more. Something more... me.

How do I achieve this new level of "me"-ness, you ask? Well, something in church really struck me this weekend and kind of answers that exact question:

***
Brothers and sisters:
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God,
with which you were sealed for the day of redemption.
All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling
must be removed from you, along with all malice.
And be kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.

So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love,
as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us
as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma. (Ephesians 4:30-5:2)
***

There it is, plain as day. Let go of everything that is not love. Let your bitterness for your past escape from your heart and breathe through moments of passing anger. Life isn't about holding onto evil, but rather overcoming evil and stepping into the light. And I think that once you learn to live in this light (as a friend so eloquently wrote in her own blog recently...), in love, in happiness, in compassion, then you can finally be who you are truly meant to be.

I guess I don't really know who I am anymore. When something defines your life for so long and is so permeating, it's hard to let the real you show through all of that. And now that I am stripped bare of these curtains that I hid behind, I am left standing there front and center in a great big spotlight. Naked to myself and the rest of the world. Finally able to see myself, without pretenses or excuses. It is just me, whoever that is now and whoever that turns out to be.

And so here I am now, sitting on my bed and smiling to myself like an idiot. Because I just cannot help but feel so blessed to have my life back. But not just my life "back." I feel so blessed to have this glorious opportunity at a new beginning. To prove to myself and the world that I am back and with a vengence. I am going to go far and do big BIG things with this new lease on life.

Who ever I am, I am happy, so deliriously happy standing in this new found light. Living in love. Letting go of bitterness and basking in compassion.

I am so me. And it feels great to be back.

With all my love,
Liv