Patch #1: It’s in the Jeans

HEY ALL YOU PEOPLE! Thanks so much for being here to witness my very first ever blog post on my first ever blog. 😀

In case you don’t know what this blog will be about, I’ve decided to (hopefully) post a blog entry once a week and just share experiences on how life has shaped me into who I am over the years. True, I am only 19 and am far from being a wise owl, BUT I do hope that a few of my stories could be a blessing in disguise to those willing to listen.  After all, that’s my motive for creating this blog in the first place, to hopefully reach out to someone who may be going through some pretty tough things I did once. If you ever DO wanna swap stories, ask questions, suggest topics for future blog entries, or just talk about anything, shoot me an email on the ‘Contact’ page and I’ll get back to you!

Enough intro for now, let’s get started. 

Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but I’m very fixated on the metaphoric and symbolic meaning behind “patches.” There’s a reason for this. When I was 7 I remember running around in my backyard playing tag with my brothers. Me, being the only girl, always had to act big, tough and rough in order to fit in. After an hour or so of playing I fell down and scraped my knee and created a hole in my jeans. After, you know, crying for a good 100 years, my mother took my jeans and sewed on a square, cut out cloth of fabric; a patch. It was bright red and I remember looking down at it whenever I wore them and thinking to myself how I thought the jeans looked cooler than ever before. The red stood out against the light blue and I always found my fingers tracing the stitching around the patch…I found it so mesmerizing, so beautiful. Whenever my friends would ask how I got the patch, I took the opportunity to tell my story. Even years after I had outgrown the jeans, I went digging through a dusty, forgotten box in the back of my closet and found the worn in, familiar blue jeans with the red patch. Instantly, the memory of a stubby Leslie waddling around with her brothers came flooding back. Time may have long passed since then, but that memory is forever engraved in that patch.

I see our lives as worn in blue jeans. I see every rough situation we’ve ever been in as the holes in the jeans. And I see how we bounce back from those situations as the bright red patch to help mend those jeans…complete with our very own story to tell.

Guys, we’ve only got this one life. There’s no do overs, and if you tumble, you can’t just UNtumble, it already happened, it’s done. But you CAN decide to either throw the jeans out or just patch it up and get going again. I know it’s easier said than done, but tell me WHO do YOU want to be? Do you truly want to be the 7 year old who stayed on the floor crying, or do you want to be able to say “Hey, I stood the heck up, dusted myself off, and kept going?” Because guess what? That takes freaking guts. If you can stand back up, that should be proof in itself that there IS hope in your situation. That there IS a silver lining. The silver lining that is being threaded with a needle into that patch. Something microscopic has to happen before the big picture is revealed.. Then once all is said and done, you’ve got your story. How are you going to tell it? What do you hope to get out of it? Are you going to throw out the jeans, or are you going to teach others how to sew?