#3: The Places We're Free to Feel
It’s only on this landscape that I remember the gift of it all—to feel so much, to be too much. To be okay with that.
Today I watched my three-year-old niece romp around my parents’ house with her fuzzy blanket. She kept falling and crying, then falling and laughing. She has big moods—moods that remind me of how I was at her age. Stubborn. Decisive. Chatty. Emotional to the point that she says serious phrases like, “Please give me privacy” and “I need alone time now, go away.”
When I was three, I had a lot of emotions too. In an old home video from the summer of ’94, red dirt stained my cheeks and a Barney & Friends t-shirt.
‘And then the monkeys went wahhhh!’ I exclaimed to my father, who followed me around our campground with a VHS camcorder. Earlier that week, we’d visited a wildlife safari park. Tall grasses glinted gold in the summer wind. I’d stared out the car window, wide eyes at the wide-open land and roaming animals.
I wandered beneath the hanging towels, wet from the previous day spent at the lake. A pensive look spread across my face, and I furrowed my brow. I was seemingly caught between m…
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