this is the dance of now. this is the girl i am.

june 27th

I walk down the steps of my new home, counting the seven cracks. Seven.

The number appears in my life frequently. I smile to myself in the sunlight, and remember that I forgot to smear sunscreen on my nose again today. Should I go back and put some on? I shrug, thinking that when I'm seventy years old, I'll have other things on my mind than a freckled, probably well-wrinkled nose. At least the rest of my face got the sunscreen on it. 

My tennis shoes make a silent rhythm on the pavement, bag slung over my shoulder. A couple passes me, hand in hand. A gentleman hanging on his cigarette a little too long. Two or three high schoolers just out of school, chattering amongst themselves; and for a brief moment, I'm there again. And I don't have to think about, fret about, become anxious over things that I just want to go...well, right. For once. 

I don't want to control them. I don't even necessarily want them to happen. I just want them to go right and well.  

My mum sent me a post recently, about how the strong girls are the ones with anxiety (click here to read that).  "This is you!" she texted me. I read it, and cried. Because there are days when I feel like I wake up, and must put on a face.  And then keep it on the whole day- if only for my students, if only for the girls.  Far too often I lurk in the exposure and shadows of too many well arranged photos on Instagram- even though that's never been something I've let define me. It's my business. It's my investment. My agent tells me I should. People tell me I need to. Comments tell me I'm beautiful, messages tell me I must have the perfect life, could be the perfect wife for whomever decided they're the guy for me that day, or be the happiest person in the world because oh my gosh who lives like that?! Who can say they're a model, an actress, work, write, and at the same time manage to appear to practically live on the beach or in green forests drinking lavender flavored lattes? 

introduce us, because i don't know that girl. 

This is the girl I am: I am the girl who struggles to find time to do everything in twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes I sleep all night, soundly nesting up with my hand tucked around myself; sometimes my brain forces me to stay awake until the wee hours of the morning wondering if I've made the right decisions thus far in the past six months alone. I love too hard and too quickly, and almost never let that go, even when.. I'm the girl who drinks two cups of coffee on those mornings, and is still drained by two o' clock in the afternoon. I drink enough water, but forget the right proteins. I feel as if I'm nearly constantly being examined in castings, and currently I have a breakout happening on my chin that I'm in the midst of trying everything I can to control. I fear that the words, "Nope, not good enough," is what's on a director's mind when I don't get the job, when the reality is that I'm very much 'good enough,' they just happened to find someone who's better for their purpose. 

This is the girl I am. I drink peppermint tea in the mornings, plan my meals, and am so filled with emotion at this beautiful, terrifying, messy life. The girl that sometimes feels faint in the summer heat because the sun is so overwhelming, yet so much like a hug from someone I perhaps don't quite know yet that I stay out longer than I should. This is the girl I am. The one that wakes up extremely early when I don't need to because I just want to watch the gorgeous colors fill the sky more than once in a day. The girl whose ink pen breaks open only when I'm wearing a white shirt. And I'm almost positive that the kidlets' beginner piano songs that I've heard at least five hundred times are the only ones I'll be able to plunk out on a piano if I ever lose my memory. I receive notes from those kiddos that make my days bright; handmade pictures and gifts that make me wonder, if and when I'm a mother, I'll still have days like these - when I grab a handful of almonds on the way out the door and call it lunch, when I pull back the sheets at night and fall into bed, or when I open my closet door and my sister jumps out at me, and I scream because the subconscious part of me that knows she's there is also that part of me that forgets to proceed with caution. 

Yet I still push myself to who I am as a young woman with a child's heart. I wake up, slick on some lipstick, throw on a pair of heels, and go about my life as a glamorous model; I grab sheet music and teach ten children the same piece and love them before I appreciate their effort; I add two or three lines to a song or journal entry thinking that someday it might come to fruition. Because I have goals in mind. To travel and venture, to see and take in as many places and people as I can. To have a family. To live and love and be loved well, if even in the smallest of places, beyond the bills to pay. And I believe in living as my best self, even on the days when I know I'm not.  

I let loose and run freely like I did ten, twelve, fifteen years ago on the beach, and feel the salt under my toes; and this is where I come alive and unwrapped. And I know this life and the potential and opportunities are one map of beautiful limitlessness, if only I allow God to continuously unwrap the expectations that I've put on myself. 

Because His face still says safety. Still says joy; still says, in sometimes what man sees as the most ordinary thing, but in what I glimpse as extraordinary as a sunset swept across the sky, 'Sierra. I love you.'

I've never felt so free. 

I'm a girl who's been saved by grace. 

That's the truth of it all.