That’s Believable

It's just a life.

Mine.

And I’m learning how that can feel like enough.

Believable.

I am someone who makes meaning out of everything. I always have been. I read patterns. I sit with synchronicities. I look at a week like this one and start drawing lines between things that probably have no business being connected.

Lately, though, I've been thinking about a different word.

Unbelievable.

A word we use to describe the best parts of life: the moments that leave us speechless, amazed, overwhelmed by wonder. But the word itself means something else entirely. Impossible. Beyond belief. Unable to be accepted as true.

This summer, I want to take unbelievable out of my vocabulary.

Maybe I'll replace it with believable.

True.

Possible.

No longer out of this world, but in it.

The other night I had an unbelievable believable dinner experience. Driving home from my first day of work, my first 9-to-5, I was coming off a too-fast carousel of last-free-summer travels: Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, Perris, Las Vegas, Virginia, Outer Banks, Pittsburgh. (What a random list.) The tiredness was setting in. I wanted nothing but a restful night at home.

I should have learned from Pittsburgh. There, during a rare 30-minute break at orientation, I made the mistake of trying to be the person who went back to the hotel to rest instead of changing at the venue with everyone else. I spent exactly 30 minutes trapped in the hotel's elevator. Number 13. With my new coworkers.

But here I was again, driving home, wanting only quiet. And then on the way, learning some news that gutted my sister's current dream for her life. I made dinner plans anyway. I avoided.

I went to the house of friends from high school and somehow got redirected into a lavish dinner, including but not even limited to a $145 ribeye with duck potatoes I audibly gasped at. This was all because a friend we've known since age 6 is now the head chef at one of my favorite restaurants.

When the tip came up, we discussed how we needed to go big as it was the least we could do for everything else getting comped. However, young college students aren't the best for keeping cash in their wallets, or in my case, even bringing a physical wallet at all. The table next to us heard our struggle, and instead of laughing or judging, on their way out, they put cash down on our table. Abundant, immaculate, beautiful. Faith in humanity infinitely restored.

And that was the first signal. Sometimes the rest we're chasing isn't where we think we'll find it. Sometimes avoidance gets redirected into abundance. Sometimes a break leads you to a broken elevator, and sometimes you walk into a $145 ribeye, and you're not the one who decides which.

From there, I moved to LA and my first full week of 9-to-5. It made me take my dog on a sushi date and write the unbelievable believable manifesto you're currently reading. It led to a conversation with two 17-year-old boys who came out of the bushes to pet my dog and argued with me, with surprising fluency, about LA versus Barcelona. It led to running to the Santa Monica beach to bond with my new roommate, only to get harassed by struggling photographers and to see lots of what were likely OF models nearby (I say this because a seagull literally dove for underwear in their unattended bag and spit it out immediately). And if you can even believe it, it all culminated with Jesus freaks on the boardwalk, stopping us to ask, “How do you think you get into heaven?” They really did not like my answer: it's already earned.

By the time the UCLA undie run came on the docket, I had lost myself in my new world enough to not so hesitantly agree to running through the school’s campus half naked. The pre-games felt like humiliation rituals at first, the absurdity of it palpable. But as soon as the run kicked off, it was just spiritual. Somehow, my takeaway was that there is never a reason to worry about showing off our bodies. Only a reason to celebrate the liberation of it all. Free from our own loud minds and perceptions of our environments, somehow free at a prestigious college that demands so much responsibility out of the people whose worlds reside in it.

I was gagged when our final stop turned out to be UCLA Ronald Reagan, the trauma unit I was once told I might be paralyzed in. There I was, in my undies, outside the building where my future had almost been taken from me. That deserved two middle fingers up and a half-naked rebellion.

Some new and old friends stood outside with me to take it all in, telling me it was one of the most unbelievable believable stories they’ve heard. For a good moment, I forgot I was in my undies. That is the kind of shit that keeps you in heaven.

But this week also brought some humble checks. The kind that arrive precisely when you start to believe you're successfully navigating a transition.

I'm making the most money I've ever made → I hit my car in the parking garage the morning after I prayed over its safety.

I'm feeling fancy-free → I have to wake up at 6 a.m. and be corporate after being in an undie run until 2 a.m.

I run around half naked → my international boyfriend, who did not go to American college, is, justifiably, a little confused.

The humble checks are also believable. Not unbelievable. Just: this is what it looks like to be inside a real life. The blessings and the dents come from the same delivery service. None of it is out of this world. All of it is in it.

But the column I'm writing this week is not about what it all means. It's about what it all is. A first day of work. Somehow people our age can be Head Chef. Strangers paying the tip. Boys in the bushes. Seagulls with stolen underwear. Jesus freaks asking me how I think we get into heaven. A run past the hospital that once owned my fear. A car with a dent. A boyfriend in another time zone trying to keep up. A new apartment. A real job.

None of it is impossible. None of it is out of reach.

It’s not a crisis of identity, or a sentence on life, or a molded path. Nor a semicolon separating two ideas of self.

It’s a transition with a comma. An incomplete me learning to get tethered to a larger statement about life.

So, I won’t tell you what it all means. I will tell you that it happened.

That it’s just a life. That it’s mine.

And that’s about all the information I can fit into the phrase before the comma.

Now that’s believable.