The Road Less Traveled By

Waking up the morning after I turned 20, and it hits me. I've reached another decade in my life, another important milestone has come and gone with little in the way of fan fare or celebration, it just quietly snuck by. I awoke today thinking of the last year, how much I have learned about myself, and how much I still have to learn. I was talking with my mom yesterday and it becomes farily overwhelming when I begin to think about the pretenses and stereotypes in society. Perhaps it would be easier to just go along with them, but then that has never been me. I've always chosen the harder road, perhaps it is the challenge that appeals to me, perhaps I'm just overly curious and would rather struggle, concour, get just plain flattened and rise again, then sweep by easy. Perhaps traveling the path less traveled I am giving myself the convidence to say 'Yes, I lived my life. Lived it the best that I can.'
The last 10 years have been a time of trial and error, like I am sure they are in everyone's life. Learning to deal with things as they are thrown at you, and yet still trying to define who you are and what you want. You're a small fish in a very large ocean, full of sharks. You do what you need to to survive, or you swim around and pretend that there isn't a great white ready to devour you around the next corner. For me, this seemingly 'drowning in the ocean' only really stopped once I graduated from highschool. All of a sudden I had me. Just me, no friends, no peers, no pressure. What did I want? What did I need? Who Was I???
The last year especially has been a huge portion of the journey to defining who I am. A rather appropriate metaphor came to me yesterday. I suddenly pictured my life like an onion. There are so many layers, so many pretenses, false presumptions, so many masks and faces that you have to peal back. Eventually, after you peal back all these layers you get to the heart. The true you. Your true self. All things that I had been taught to assume, or told to expect, all the things that I had seen and done are all flying out the window. You have to live, and appreciate each layer as it comes off, perhaps so you know what you do not need anymore, perhaps so you can appreciate where you have been, and now look forward to where you will go. For me the horses are a huge part of this peel process. They have pointed me in every direction, started the process of peeling off every layer.  Some days I feel very... naked... vulnerable. Having to see everything so honestly is not easy, but I know I am stronger, a better person for it. Now I am able to look forward to the next years. Defining who I am, living who I am, truly walking this path I am on.

The Road not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as far,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travled by,
And that has made all the difference.