Sometimes nostalgia has you going back to the beginning. The basics. It’s where all the fundamentals of who you are began. It’s where you made the stand. The stand to change and grow into the person you are now. And so it began, the journey of change and growth until one day you woke up and realize you took the journey for granted.
You forgot to appreciate the process and the small moments of growth, and in doing so, things got away from you. You lost a bit of the fundamentals – specifically the fundamentals that influenced you to make the decisions you made.
This is the thought I had tonight as I found myself rearranging my apartment and doing some deep cleaning that had been overdue. As I washed the dishes, finishing up the last part of what was a therapeutic cleaning, I found myself missing the basics.
As I moved my microwave back into the spot it had been years previous, it felt like I was starting fresh once more. I know it’s just a microwave, but it represented more than that.
It was like a symbolic representation of the fundamentals. For example, when I started my weight loss journey back in 2020, I kept the microwave by the fridge so I could pull out frozen vegetables and pop them in the microwave.
Sometime last year, I decided to move the microwave away from the fridge to the other side of the sink. Over time, I found myself not eating as many vegetables. I would roast them in the oven and eventually began to steam them on the stove, but I realize now the purpose of the microwave was that it made it all the more easier to just get a simple task done.
Take out a frozen bag of vegetables, pop it in the microwave, and once done, season them to liking. Over time, I complicated the process and made it more time-consuming, which explains why, as life got busier, I found myself not reaching for vegetables as much.
For example, I was too tired to cook dinner tonight, so I had a frozen breakfast burrito and some unsweetened applesauce. That was it—easy and basic. That’s what I miss: aligning my life so that even when I am tired, I am still making good decisions.
Sometimes this requires being intentional and purposeful in ways that might not make sense to others. This post wasn’t supposed to be about vegetables, but hey, leave it to me to find some deeper meaning in a moment such as moving a microwave back to its previous spot.
Hours earlier, I had been listening to some soundtrack music while organizing, rearranging, and cleaning, and I found myself processing some moments I hadn’t had a chance to, like the recent ending of one of my favorite TV shows, Station 19, and the closeness of a favorite character of mine.
School has been so busy that this is the first time I found myself processing the end of a chapter, a TV show that had been a part of my life since 2018, seven great seasons that I grew along with.
So I guess it was only right that this whole night had me processing a lot when I took time to get things in order. I had been feeling out of sorts for quite some time now and it was overdue, if I do admit, and I feel a weight lifted off my shoulders.
Perhaps this was what I needed—to process some things and acknowledge that I am missing the fundamentals of certain things in my life that made it easier and that it is time to bring them back to the forefront even as a busy college student.
The Broke College Student 
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