Life lessons for twenty-somethings, vol. 1
Hug your friends and tell them you love them embarrassingly often. You never know when you’ll see them next.
You are the main character in every story you create. Do not revolve your world around making others comfortable.
Setting and maintaining your boundaries is necessary for self-preservation. You have to set the bar for how you want to be treated, or someone else will set it for you.
Despite what our egos tell us, it is actually a very good thing to be a beginner at something. Doing so allows us opportunities to play with childlike wonder.
None of us are free until all of us are free to live in a dignified and just world. We all have more anti-racist work to do.
Our decision making is affected more by the environments we find ourselves in than we consciously know.
When you finally live a life you love, you will stop looking for ways to escape it.
Life is too short to be lived in the closet. Yes, I mean that in terms of sexuality (pending safety concerns of course), but I also mean that life is too short to minimise yourself, and obscure who you really are from the world.
Some people will say they don’t know what they’re looking for in a relationship. This is them trying to let you down easily. Move on to someone who is sure they want you.
When it comes to the good and the bad, it won’t always be this way.
In defence of solo romance
Valentine’s Day is my absolute favourite holiday, but I can understand that most folks don’t feel the same.
Perhaps you see it as capitalistic bullshit. Perhaps you feel disappointed by a partner who consistently does nothing for you (dump them). If you’re single, perhaps it stings with the loneliness of not feeling “chosen” by someone else.
The good news is, you can always choose yourself!!
Here’s my pro tip if you want to actually enjoy the day: take yourself on a date.
The older I get, the more I LOVE a good solo date. Nothing makes me feel as powerful as looking a restaurant host in the eye and letting them know that “I’d like a table for one, please”.
I credit my love of self dates to a tradition I started in the eighth grade. Every year, I made my friends dress up with me so that our moms (and later ourselves) could take us out for heart-shaped pizza. I didn’t have any meaningful men in my life at the time, so I saw February 14th as a celebration for the girls.
Last year, I had just moved to a new city and hadn’t yet made any friends. I’d been keeping Galentines Day going since 2012, and I refused to give up on the holiday tradition I’d started.
I ordered pizza, watched my favourite guilty pleasure movie, played my “4 Shawty” playlist, and reminded myself how much I loved my own company.
And honestly? It was one of my favourite days of the whole year.
This year and every year after, I’m going to prioritise finding ways to romance myself.
The “feeling”
The “feeling” is akin to a girl crush: you know you are absolutely enamoured with someone, only you can’t tell whether you want to be them, be their best friend or be dating them.
The first time I felt the “feeling” was in seventh grade. I could have sworn the sun revolved around one of my then-friends because all I wanted to do was bask in her presence. One day I thought to myself, “Wait, does this make me a lesbian?”, and my life was forever changed.
Just kidding. I wish figuring it all out had been that straightforward. Instead, it took ten years of navigating internalized homophobia, compulsive heteronormativity, “girl crushes”, actual girl crushes and a range of experiences with different genders to figure out that I wasn’t a lesbian, but that I sure wasn’t straight either.
I spent a decade trying to hate the queer out of myself, but the “feeling” kept stubbornly popping up, insistent like a wildflower that grows between cracks in the sidewalk.
It finally dawned on me that the “feeling” wasn’t going anywhere at 22. When I decided to finally embrace it, I learned that my bisexuality was a superpower. Why?
Because in spite of a world that demanded I “pick a side”, my sexuality eschewed rigidity and simply bloomed.
Wait, what AM I doing here?
In the summer of 2020, I spontaneously took a road trip to British Columbia by myself to spend a week with friends. One week became two. Two became three. Three became indefinitely. To sum up how I was feeling at the time:
“Holy shit. I’m actually doing this. Wait, what AM I doing here?”
If there’s one thing life in British Columbia has taught me so far, it’s that there is beauty in taking in adventures and opportunities as they come. When the opportunity to live close to the ocean and mountains found me, I jumped into the deep end and said yes. Not knowing what I would be doing there was nerve-wracking, and for weeks afterwards, I wondered if I had made the “right” decision.
Sometimes there is no right decision other than to make one. This brings me to the following quote I started living by that season. Perhaps it’ll resonate with you too:
“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action you experience.”
I may not know what the future holds, but that won’t stop me from getting excited about the possibilities anyway.
You never know what magic you could find
I find my purpose in policy and my magic in creativity.
I bring smiles to every stranger I walk past and goofy dance moves to every party I attend.
I get really excited when I think about the future, and equally so about the nostalgia of snail mail, pinky promises, and vinyl records.
I love spectacle and sparkly dresses, but I also like staying in to listen to your stories.
I keep my closet in chronological order and thrive on list making, but I am the clumsiest person you’ll ever meet.
In short: I am a walking contradiction.
Some might call that two-faced, but I like to think we’re all multidimensional. I’ve been pondering over humans lately, and how quickly we use one-word descriptives when we label others. It’s easier to think of people that way. It streamlines our lives, makes it faster for us to scroll through our newsfeeds.
But I think we miss out on truly understanding people until we notice the little bit of everything that exists in them.
If you feel like you have to suppress parts of yourself to please other people, know this: In embracing all the sides of who you are, you may feel misunderstood by some (maybe even the majority), but your people can only find you once you’re brave enough to put the real you out there.
And if you’re someone quick to judge, try to listen a little more closely to the stories around you - you never know what magic you could find.
The fist-in-the-air moment I never got
I always thought the end of university would feel triumphant. A fist-in-the-air moment, confirmation that these really were “the best four years of your life”.
Truth be told, my university experience was a rollercoaster with pretty steep drops. In my final year, things finally felt like they were turning in my favour. When I heard the announcement “we are prepared to shut down” in lecture hall the day before isolation, I couldn’t believe it. Nothing was going to ruin the movie reel in my head, right? Not when things were finally getting good?
What followed was a flurry of adjusting to social distancing, somber trips to the grocery store and a tough decision to move home. I’d promised myself that I would get out of Ottawa as soon as I graduated. When that day came, I expected it to be a grandiose going away party, not a handful of goodbyes I never got to say.
The first few months of the pandemic, I felt as though my world was upside down, with no idea when things would be right side up again.
And yet, it was comforting, the thought that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.
While the pandemic made us more physically isolated than ever, I like to think that in some sense, it has also made us closer than ever before.
From mass applause for health care workers to community balcony dance parties, to elderly-only hours at supermarkets, to declining air pollution, there is proof everywhere of good news, even amidst newsreel heartbreak.
Surely this will not make up for the fear or the loss of the crisis. What it has done is show us the importance of life-saving science, the value of our essential workers, and the shortcomings of our social systems.
My hope is that we use COVID-19 as a catalyst for unprecedented cooperation in the face of future global challenges. That we use it to always be grateful and to never take the good news for granted. Above all, I hope that we treat every encounter we come across in our daily lives as though it’s a long-awaited reunion in an airport terminal.
This will end, even if we don’t know how or when. We have to keep reminding ourselves of that. And when it does, it will be a triumphant one, far better than the movie reel in my head was supposed to be.
Proost!
I went on my first solo backpacking trip in 2019.
Traveling alone around the Netherlands felt vulnerable. I spent my first few days hyper aware of my surroundings. My concerns were real, but as I familiarized myself, I became more comfortable saying yes.
One ‘yes moment’ I had was befriending a local. It ended up being the best decision I made.
My host and I bonded over folk music and our free-spirited adventures. He taught me of hidden gems in Europe, which I added to my travel bucket list. We toured a windmill, visited a coffeeshop and drank beer in a church-turned-brewery.
Together, we experienced life as Dutch as it could be - or so I thought.
There was one thing I hadn't yet done: spend a night out on the town.
I spent a short while in Spain, and when I returned, my newfound friend welcomed me with open arms.
We met up with the rest of his floormates to head for the club. I thought we were catching an Uber, but I was wrong.
Instead, everyone unlocked their bicycles.
“Hop on my handlebars!” my friend exclaimed, and so I did.
A fleet of fifteen of us cycled to a pub, laughed, sang and danced the night away. The evening was silly and strange, whimsical and fun; which is exactly how I would describe the Netherlands as a whole.
To new friends, new adventures, and to seeing the world in a new light: Proost!
Kicking down doors
“What makes you happy?”
My mentor Jay asks me over a macadamia nut latte and a fresh baked donut.
I was looking for a job at the time, so I told him I was pretty good at administrative work.
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said, “tell me what you’re passionate about.”
I then told him about sharing my poetry with the world. He got goosebumps when I spoke.
“You haven’t stopped smiling since you started talking. Not once did you mention how difficult it was to do that.”
We agreed that it is being truthful and vulnerable that makes us great.
We then discussed the importance of looking in the mirror.
“What if your situation had given him a mirror to look at why he did this? Something probably hurt him as a kid that he never properly healed from. We have to change the perpetrators, because if we don’t, they will continue to do this.”
When I think of sexual violence, I’m angry. Rightfully so, given what I and so many others have been through. Anger provides great impetus for taking action.
But in that moment, I realized that if I really wanted to be a great leader, if I really wanted to make a difference in this world, then I needed to meet my anger with empathy too.
That day, Jay called me a “compassionate warrior”. It is hands down the best compliment I’ve ever received.
“What does a compassionate warrior do?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “in your case, it means you’re going to kick down doors and shatter glass ceilings.”
The earth does not belong to us
“Are you looking for the best snorkelling spot?”
A local asks me, thickly smeared layer of sunscreen across his nose. This point is where he checks the weather conditions every day.
“I’ll tell ya, you picked a good day to go. Park a little further down the road, enter the bay there and you might even spot a sea turtle.”
I follow his instructions like they are the coordinates to finding gold.
I slip into the ocean and kick my flippers, watching schools of fish change their course of direction beneath me. Words I’ve only heard in elementary spelling tests - amethyst, azure, cerise, chartreuse - come to life in the hues of the coral and wildlife. I’m busy taking it all in when I feel a burst of movement directly below.
A giant sea turtle. It passes underneath my belly, completely uninhibited by my presence, even within my arms’ reach. Its lack of fear catches me off guard until I realize:
We belong to this earth. It does not belong to us.
A man once complained to me that the ban the straws campaign was blown way out of proportion; but if the reduction of straws is equal to one less turtle choking on our waste, then it is a worthwhile measure to take.
I don’t want to contribute to a world that causes the wild to fear us. If that means becoming conscious of every little piece of plastic I use until I learn not to use it, so be it.
Ocean degradation is a problem requiring system-level shifts, but I still have a responsibility to be better.
We all do.
What’s in a name?
It all begins with an idea.
According to my parents, a lot.
After a painfully long twenty-seven-and-a-half hours of labour, I was finally introduced to the world on July 30th, 1998.
My mother was exhausted. She told the doctors she wouldn’t have the energy to hold me until after she caught up on sleep, so I was passed off to my father and shown around town.
The first question anyone had for him was, “What’s the baby’s name?”
“Taylor” my father confidently replied.
There was one problem with this: my parents hadn’t come to a consensus on my name. Taylor had been my father’s first choice and my mother’s third. So when she heard the news, she was pissed.
Since it was too late to change it, my father’s executive decision on my first and last name stuck. My mother, however, fuelled by egalitarianism and spite, decided I was getting not one, but two middle names: Alyssa and Jade.
My middle names have stuck with me, as a reminder of the indignant power held by the matriarchs of my family. Naming this website in their honour is a reminder that everything I am able to do is because of the indignant power they passed onto me.