This too shall pass.

This weekend I had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite places in the world.

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Los Angeles.

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Plenty of people hate Los Angeles for plenty of reasons that are probably justified and true, but I’ll always have a soft spot for it in my heart. I went to college in southern california, some of the most formative years of my life, and the place my friends and I would dream about going to from all the way up in Sacramento during high school; so it will always be a place that I appreciate going to.

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But the purpose of this trip was to attend my cousin’s wedding. It was a pretty big deal considering he was the first one and the first boy out of my generation of the family to be getting married, so everybody showed out to support. 

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Of course I got asked about my own love life throughout the weekend, but I expected that so I was ready for their questions. Whenever I would tell them I didn’t have a girlfriend, family members would be shocked and concerned as if they didn’t believe me, which I actually thought was pretty funny. 

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It was going to be a weekend full of friends, family, and celebration, but admittedly I was feeling like I was just going through the motions at the beginning.

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To be honest, I had been in a pretty hard funk during the week leading up to the weekend. I slogged through the week feeling lonely and isolated, and my way of dealing with it is to just thug it out until it eventually goes away.

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Not particularly in a romantic way, but more as in I would just find myself doing most things throughout the day alone and without anybody really reaching out to me for anything. While I do live at home with my family, I find I’m just by myself most of the time and it seems like the rest of my family and friends have their own lives that just don’t happen to intersect with mine as much anymore. 

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I can’t seem to shake this feeling that everybody is off living their own lives, but forgot to bring me along. So I’m left to just do my own thing and figure things out for myself. But I never got the memo so I had to realize it on my own one day.

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It’s almost kind of like getting slowly ghosted, but with family and friends instead.

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I think as people get older they just tend to focus on themselves, while other priorities they used to have begin to fall to the wayside. It’s either they start to focus on their own lives or stop putting as much effort into trying to maintain the relationships they’ve had for years. Probably a combination of both. 

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Which in all honesty, is fine. I’ve learned to adjust.

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I would consider myself mostly a homebody and introverted too, so being alone has never really been an issue for me most of the time. But for some reason this particular week was hitting extra hard for whatever reason. 

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While I was down there, I did manage to hang out with some of my close friends from college who I barely get to see anymore now that we’ve all graduated and I moved back up north to Sacramento.

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It felt like old times, just drinking and talking shit like we used to while we were all in school. It really made me feel like whenever I do leave Sacramento, I would have a second home with people here that I could rely on. 

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At one point, my friend even told me how much he liked my blog and how he reads every single time I post a new one. Which actually really warmed my heart because I put a lot of effort into these things and I’m really baring my heart out here, so to hear that meant a lot to me.

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The next day at the wedding, I’ll admit I felt a little bit out of place and didn’t know what to do with myself. I just ended up sticking with my family, but since my mom and brother weren’t there, I was the only one representing my part of the family. I don’t really go to weddings that much, I guess people I know just aren’t getting married that often, I wasn’t really sure how they would go and what to do except sit there and drink my beer from the open bar.

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Weddings are actually kind of wild. You invite all of your friends and family to watch you celebrate your love for another person, where you then get into a legal contract that obligates you to love them for the rest of your life. Meanwhile we’re all just attendees for your love concert where we clap and cheer for you for a whole night. While the wedding itself was pretty cool and I did have fun, it’s kind of a wild concept if you think about it.

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But, anyway.

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I’m happy to say I actually had a good time. The night was full of drinking, laughing, getting closer to my own family who I see often but also even my family who I don’t really see that often. It felt like at times there was a whole side to my family that I never really see, and this was the time to see that and share some memories.

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I ended up getting much closer to my cousin (the groom), who I was never really that close with growing up. We are quite far apart in age but it seems like now we could finally start building a relationship now that we are all older and adults now. He even introduced me to a ton of his friends who all were great and took me in like one of their own and they even invited me up to their penthouse to drink after the ceremony.

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It was nice to get together with family but also with strangers to celebrate the people that we all care about and their special day. The moment calls for you to not really worry about yourself and what you’re going through, but to just celebrate someone else and their happiness, which I thought was really nice.

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Something I didn’t know, but really needed at the time.

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After the weekend, I found myself feeling quite happy and rejuvenated. A stark contrast from how I was feeling the week before. 

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I guess the moral of the story is… yeah sometimes you feel alone. It’s inevitable.

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You can feel lonely sitting there by yourself or surrounded by a group of people. It’s a normal human emotion that everybody goes through at some point. 

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But on the bright side, it will eventually pass. And hopefully you will be reminded that there are people out there who care about you and who haven’t forgotten you. You just have to allow them to find you. They may not even be the ones you think, but even so they may even be people you don’t even know yet. So be willing to put yourself out there and be receptive to people, they may surprise you.

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Congratulations Matthew & Lina too ❤️