on waiting.

Last week when I was home, it was just my parents and me Wednesday through Friday. And being there reminded me of when I first graduated college and got a job in Indy. I lived at home to save money (medium successful...) and it was just the three of us.

Together, we moved out our my childhood home into our new one. We broke it in together, learned the new neighborhood, developed new-house routines. 

It was fun - really fun. It was the first time I'd lived at home as a grown up. It had never been OK for us to have a glass of wine together. I'd never had job stuff to talk to them about instead of school stuff. It had never been just me and them - it had almost always been the seven of us, or at least always five of us. Never just three. 

I look back on it as a really sweet time I had with them and I'm so grateful for it. It changed my relationships with them and helped us see one another in a new light. 

But you know what? While I was living there, I was so stressed. I couldn't relax because I felt like I should have been living in my own apartment. Failure to launch. That's how I felt every day. Silly for living with my parents, when everyone else had houses in Broadripple and apartments in Indy. I was in the suburbs replacing high school framed pictures in my bedroom with college ones, while everyone else was hanging cool prints in their freshly painted kitchens. 

Comparing, comparing. I was so stressed.

I thought of that when I was up early Wednesday morning. I was brushing my teeth, so excited to go get some of my mom's coffee before work. And all of those feelings came rushing back. I was in my old routine and it felt like barely anything had changed - like I'd stepped back in time just for a moment. 

And I looked in the mirror and told myself what I wished I'd known then: calm down, Whitney. You'll get there. You aren't stuck - it's just not your time yet. Be grateful for the right now. Be grateful for what you're learning; what you're living. The next step will be taken, but right now is so important. And it's so sweet. Don't rush it. Take a deep breath and enjoy it. 

I write this as I sit in my house in Atlanta. Melissa is in the other room and I'm on the couch, blogging away. Our place is clean. It has cute decorations. It has wood floors and things I didn't even imagine having back then. 

Because the future is so often sweeter than we could have imagined. 

But we have to wait. We have to embrace the now in order to get to the future. So today, I'm not rushing. I'm not stressing. I'm enjoying it, carrying my head high, my heart filled to the brim with joy. Because the future is exciting, but the right now is so worth living. Every minute of it.