Write what you know.

But what do I know? It’s true what they say that you know less as you grow older than you did when you were 18 (or in my case 16 since I was a know it all at a young age).

Since 2004, I have been dishing out what I think was important and relevant in terms of love, life, my faith, politics, never fashion (which I grew to love), and just anything that made sense. Soon I was also dishing out on every social media platform I could get my introverted hands on and while I applaud my younger self for being brazen enough to speak what was on her mind I can honestly tell you that I no longer feel as brave as she does.

Or maybe time, age, and experience has subdued me. Not every topic needs to be retweeted, not every news article with my own opinion needs to be shared on Facebook, nor should every comment be liked, or every life moment shared. I used to want to share EVERYTHING. I do not know the point I was trying to prove but suddenly (especially since I moved here and away from the subculture I grew up in), I saw the plastic bubble I lived in.

I wanted to be deemed important. I wanted my social media accounts to prove I was doing better than the girl he chose over me or I was smarter than who they promoted. I was unconsciously creating a brand that merely reflected what I wanted it to reflect. Perfectly cut squares of my life that took hours to curate.

I was always SO NOISY. I wanted people to think I was pretty. I wanted them to think I was smart. I wanted them to know that I knew what was going on in current events and most importantly, I wanted them to know my opinion of things.

But now that I am older (and hopefully wiser), I have fallen in love with merely being a bystander. I love liking my friends’ photos showing how they are thriving in life, I adore sending in heart emojis to celebrate my friends’ victories, and I love the fact that Veronica Mars is back on air again.

Now that I am not constantly filling the already populated world of the Internet – I am now learning the value of simply observing which leads to being mindful. Instead of falling in love with sharing my thoughts with a click – I take the moment to step back, observe what I am reading, and wondering if it needs an answer.

For a girl who’s always spoken too much too soon too many times being able to step back to assess what I am really responding to has been such a freedom. And it all has to do with the interactions and situations I found myself in in the past year or so.

If I were being brutally honest I would be the first to tell you that I just survived the ABSOLUTE WORST season of my life and yet I commend myself for being able to see the season through knowing that every season was just that, a season.

Every day I got up with the determination to see the other side and that is when EVERYTHING YOU KNOW becomes tested. You begin to question and doubt everything you believe in. You begin to challenge notions you were raise with. You begin to challenge your own beliefs. You dig, you discover, and you get through to a better place.

It’s like a war inside your head and within your heart and just like any warrior you come out of it bruised yet smarter. And it is those bruises that teach you what you need to know – the power in humility, the grace in betrayal, and the hope in the darkest situations.

You don’t understand how it could come about. How you could have a won a battle that has devastated your heart and crushed your soul and yet somehow you did. That is when you realize that God is real and everything I believed about him is real. The more you come in contact with life’s harshness, the more you realize how truly gracious our God is.

How much patience He has for His children as they question him in the desert and how incredibly faithful He is to hold our hand as we pass through the valleys and into the hills. How we graciously He carries us from situations that has caused so much pain into an enlightened state of blessings.

And life is like that – it’s a cycle and what we know today may not be what we know tomorrow and yet we stop for a moment to bask in its goodness and to rest in what we know now.

Because it is all that we need in this moment and we thank God for always providing just what we need lest we drown. We take it a day at time and as we learn to quietly do so – we grow and we see life in ways we haven’t before.

A quiet and steadfast pace where we do not need to prove we are intellectual or better than the next social media star. That it’s okay to watch others win, that it’s okay to simply celebrate our victories in secret, and to just stop showing off. We simply be and for me at this moment – simply being is more important than knowing.