always looking forward to something, something to dress up in, something to be or not to be
the adorning of adora.
And to learn to just be.
To not dress up.
To not need other characters.
To just be as I am.
Coming back into my creativity.
Back into myself.
The adorning of adora.
The adorning of me.
Sometimes you have to see yourself through someone else, through a reflection of who you truly are.
Sometimes it’s hard for us to see ourselves clearly, to see ourselves in our entirety, without the caveat of being you. Without the fear of always having to show up as you, especially when you’re having trouble seeing yourself fully.
Sometimes another person can reflect yourself back to you.
“Going home won’t always feel good,” my sister, who is about five years older than me, said this to me. I was on my monthly cycle and becoming overly emotional over the phone about finances and planning a trip back to my hometown. It had been almost a year since I had returned home after leaving last August. I didn’t have anything against going home, but I also hadn’t felt a pull to since I had left.
While fighting back the tears and trying to pull myself together, my sister and I both decided that I would fly home and spend some much-needed family time. Everything feels heightened when a woman is on her period. Sometimes the smallest decision becomes too big and bad, and you feel as though you are being swallowed whole by the world. This was one of those times, and that’s exactly how I was feeling. Going home felt complicated and packed with baggage I didn’t want to unload.
Now, as I sit here writing this piece from my childhood bedroom, I don’t know what I was so worried about. Maybe I thought I would feel small sitting on my quilts that had been in this room for years. Maybe I would miss my bed at my apartment. Maybe I would miss my boyfriend and our morning coffee ritual. Maybe I would get into an argument with my dad that would make me regret ever coming back. But I felt none of this.
Today I waved my parents goodbye as they took their daily walk. I smiled at them as the car pulled out of the driveway. I felt this sort of calmness and joy within myself. I’m 24 now, traveling back to my childhood home, where the house still stands, just not as full anymore. It feels strange walking through a house that used to be filled with so many voices. I watch how my parents interact with my younger brother, who is pretty much treated as an only child. He’s about to start his sophomore year in college. He’s only nineteen, but he’s probably one of the humblest men I know in this world. He has this sort of softness in him that I hope he never loses. He’s close with my mom in a way that I wish I was, and I see how my dad has influenced him. They both have more time now than they did when they were raising five kids. Now it seems as though they are just raising one.
It makes me happy to know my brother is experiencing a different side of them. It also makes me sad that he’s coming home during summer break to an empty house. I don’t think he shares the same feelings as myself, though. Which is a common experience I have with people. I oftentimes feel this overwhelming amount of emotion for people and situations that don’t need me to feel for them. I feel too much. That’s how I think of it. Some people don’t feel enough, but I feel too much.
Coming home might not always feel good, but this time it does.
I was speaking to a close friend over the phone a few nights ago, and she said something that I couldn’t seem to shake. This friend recently got married and moved halfway across the world. Her life had changed so drastically in the past year, much like my own.
She told me over the duration of the call she was thinking of taking up a career in nutrition. She said she just wanted to follow her passions at this point in her life. When she really sat back and thought about it, she realized she was truly passionate about food. Honestly, when she said it, it made sense to me.
What stuck with me wasn’t her choice of passion, but rather this idea of following what makes you passionate versus what you think you are supposed to be doing.
As a society, we are taught from a young age to get through high school, do well enough to get into an acclaimed college, and while in college, get an internship in preparation for a job offer by your senior year—one that makes you enough money to pay your bills. Nowhere in this generic formula does it say to find a job that you love, to find something that you are passionate about and stick with it.
It feels as though we are programmed to put financial gain over what makes us happy. This causes recent 22-year-old graduates to slide into positions they believe they are expected to enjoy. In reality, from my own personal experience, a lot of people are not following the things that make them happy—such as music, writing, cooking, art, and so much more—because the things that make us happy tend not to be money-makers.
So, we are taught to suck it up, fall right into the rat race, and just try to stay afloat. In this process, many of us tend to sacrifice our happiness, myself included. I constantly feel this pull between doing what I love and finding something that will pay the rent. Without the financial stress and the general expectations around what success looks like, I believe more people would be in completely different careers.
This tension between doing what is expected of us to survive in society and doing what brings us internal happiness fascinates me. I wonder how much society would change if we were all able to pursue careers that made us happy. Would we live in a more communal society? Would there be less crime? Would fewer people pursue higher education? If money were out of the equation, how would our daily interactions change?
Money breeds power imbalances, and imbalances breed anger, and eventually, violence.
I don’t have any answers to these questions at the moment, but I created this blog to begin curating and broadening what I am truly passionate about. I also have not found the balance between doing what I love and being able to fulfill my responsibilities. But I feel as though asking the big questions creates a space where others who feel this way can understand that they are not alone.
Now, I will leave you with some food for thought:
If money wasn’t a motivator, would you stay in your current position? If not, what would you be doing?
I don’t think about how much I miss Jamaica until I’m back, as if there is something in the air that traps your thoughts of island nostalgia for when you return. Well, my thoughts were released, and as my hair soaked up the Jamaican sea, I could feel life coming back into my body.
I had been drained from moving, job searching, paying bills I had never had before, and trying to navigate conversations around going down a creative path. It’s funny, I feel as though when you tell people you’re interested in a more creative field, they want you to back up your artistic endeavors with more than just a feeling of passion. Questions such as, “How will you make money?”, “What happened to law school?”, and “Where did this creative side come from?” swarm in. And if you are not confident enough in your responses, they might just think you have no idea what you’re doing.
And even though I am confident in whatever I say back, whether I believe it or not, I damn sure have no idea what I am doing.
During the months of April and May, I spent more time mourning the loss of my financially driven career path than actually putting thought into what path I wanted to go down. I spent extensive brain power scrolling on TikTok, watching videos of 24-year-old girls living the life I thought I “should” have been living.
This idea of “should” is so complicated and can drag you into a deep hole of depression if you let it, and trust me, at one point, I let it.
In 2024, I was 22 and had just graduated from undergrad. Soon after my anticlimactic graduation, I started seeing a therapist online in Boston. I was working a job I hated and living a life I never saw for myself. But isn’t this what you wanted? I thought to myself. Isn’t this the life you dreamed of having post-grad? This is how it should be, I contemplated week after week.
There it was again, that “should.”
And it happened to be the first topic Bianca and I discussed in our very first session. She asked me where I got this way of thinking. I told her I had experienced some challenging events in my early adulthood, and I had this idea that those very small events plagued my current state. So when things occasionally worked out for me, like landing this job in the middle of my senior year, I thought, “You should be happy. This is how it’s supposed to be. This is what being happy looks like.”
I don’t even know whose standards I was living up to or whose passions I was following, but looking back, it wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I was traveling down someone else’s path, in shoes that didn’t fit, like a body snatcher. And honestly, I felt like one each day I slipped on tight slacks when I really wanted to throw on loose, ripped, thrifted Levi’s and a small cropped top. But that wasn’t corporate attire, and that wasn’t the path I “should” be going down.
Bianca helped me to stop living in the “should” and to just live in a place where my mind could roam freely. A place where I could learn to let go of what was making me feel so trapped. I was able to quit my job, move back home, and get my mind right. I’ll always be grateful to Bianca for that. We spent such a short period of time talking, although she helped me through such a hard time. A transitional period that I was working so hard not to accept.
While home, my dad offered to fly me to Jamaica to get my head right, although I was still living in such an avoidant state. I didn’t want to admit to him that I needed the trip and the space that it would entail, even though I had come clean to Bianca, who up until a few weeks prior had been a complete stranger.
It’s strange how therapy works. You start sessions with someone you barely know. They learn so much about your life, and by the end of each session, you know absolutely nothing about them.
I wasn’t used to that sort of interaction. I was used to meeting people and gearing the conversation entirely in a way where they could talk about themselves. Especially in the past two years, I had developed the ability to make any topic about someone else.
I didn’t want to talk about myself, or my relationship at the time, or my family, or how my brain was chaotic and I felt detached from it more than I felt grounded. I wanted to talk about them. I wanted to hear about their life, their problems, their family.
I didn’t want to answer questions about myself. I didn’t want to remind myself that I was living in a mental prison, that I was unable to express myself truthfully, and that I was settling for a life I didn’t want to live because, as I thought over and over and over again, this is how life “should” be.
Be happy. Be happy. Be happy.
Why do I have to “be”? Why can’t I just feel?
You have to feel happy. It shouldn’t be something you have to remind yourself to do, like a chore being checked off a tattered piece of notebook paper hanging on the fridge by a $10 Gen Z magnet.
Although now, as I lather myself in the ocean water, I am just feeling instead of trying.
If Bianca could see me now, I’m sure she would be proud. The woman she met two years ago was a shell of herself. This woman is filled with the Caribbean sea and plump with creative ideas.
I am not fully comfortable with my brain, or my body, or my life, but I’m fully comfortable with talking about it, and that’s the most important aspect.
What you don’t vocalize, you are scared of. I learned that during those hard years alone in my dorm room. I trapped every idea in my head. I was scared of my thoughts, my emotions, and the walls I had built up.
What you don’t vocalize will become all-consuming.
And maybe I’m not entirely comfortable with the current labels I’m attaching to myself: “artist,” “writer,” “curator,” “MFA,” “PhD.”
Maybe I’m more comfortable living life on a whim, leaving the future up to God. Or maybe I’m not.
But I’d rather vocalize it than let it consume me, eat me from the inside out. My brain is the only thing I’m fully in control of, so for now, I decide to just do and feel.
To do what makes me feel happy.
That’s the simple equation. Or maybe that’s just the equation I’m choosing to live by while I soak up this Caribbean Sea.
Jennifer Packer, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna Breonna!)
I graduated college two years ago. When I say it out loud, I feel unaccomplished. Although, when I sit down and think instead of just feeling and speaking, I remember where I was mentally two years ago. And you couldn’t pay me a million dollars to be back there, so in actuality, I’ve accomplished a lot.
I got through a breakup that almost tainted the best parts of me. I moved back home and navigated a dark period with my parents. I left the corporate world, studied for the LSAT, and failed at that (in my eyes), and pivoted. I moved out of my hometown and met the man who has been the most pivotal in my journey of growth. I made money & lost it. I set boundaries even when I didn’t want to, even when it felt more painful than just not having them at all. I created a bond with my grandparents that I never thought I would have had & accepted some feelings about my family that were suffocating me.
I grew to let my friends in, to love them in the same way they have loved me for so many years. I confronted them about aspects of my individual relationships with each of them that had been in my head for years, and I cried. I cried about my breakup, about losing myself, and not letting them in. I cried to them about my family and how I felt misunderstood, and how sometimes I still do. I listened to them while they told me parts about myself that were hard to hear, but true. I mourned the past, even though sometimes I feel like I’m still living in it, like I’m tethered to it in the most unhealthy and draining way.
Then I remind myself that I survived. That I came up for air and learned how to breathe again. I learned how to live through myself instead of using someone else to keep me alive. I rewired my nervous system and learned how love is supposed to feel. I learned that therapy can help and that my mom is right at times, even if our relationship is complicated. To trust her, even when it’s uncomfortable.
I learned that I would be okay, even if it didn’t feel okay. That God will always protect & that I will always protect myself.
Lastly, I learned how to write again. One of my greatest talents and one of God’s greatest gifts to me.
I guess in these past years, I’ve accomplished more than I have lost. Even if it doesn’t feel like it at times, I did. And I’ll always remember these past two years, or more so I’ll always feel these years in me. I’ll remember the pain that came through being present & the strength that came through learning to be Makeda again.
Regards,
Makeda Adora
P.S: Please enjoy the art at the bottom of the home page, painted by my talented & beautiful friend, Ally Sukay.
TheAdornmentofAdora 