Intention: It manifests tangibly in my everyday world. The stack of library books perched on my coffee table in the order I’ll read them. My prioritized, color-coded to-do list. The growing nest of Command strips, nails, hooks and tools on the counter, each a promise to my blindingly blank walls that they’ll one day house the “grown-up girl” art I claimed I’d buy after college.

Even my well-intentioned world of cryptic, multilevel to-do lists is its own illusion. Intention, I realized recently, is about more than checking items off my list or adding a new interview-worthy skill to my resume every few months; it’s about deliberate efforts to break old habits and, for me, returning to a few really ugly moments.

I’ve only recently found the gumption to reflect on the semester of college I spent binge-drinking cheap, terrible booze (example: my roommates and I had practically every flavor of UV vodka emptied atop our kitchen cabinets as decoration … decoration). My lone intention that semester was to feel as little as possible. I felt bad for feeling bad about something that my logical side said shouldn’t have broken me like it did. I felt lost after a beloved professor’s sudden death.

(If you derive one nugget of wisdom from this post, let it be this: UV lemonade is the awful, 21-plus version of errant bug spray floating into your mouth before that summer trip to the lake.) Back to the constructive commentary.

I’m rethinking intention through a series of daily changes. Rather than wandering the Internet each morning in search of the answer to some existential question (i.e. “Which Taylor Swift ‘1989’ music video are you?”), I’ve started reading one chapter of a memoir or autobiography (I recommend Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies). There’s something about peering into someone else’s soul at 5:34 a.m. that invites me, gently, to examine my own.

I noticed the stark, beautiful contrast of these streetlights in a moment of stillness on one of my evening walks.

After I finish that chapter, I force myself to be still for five minutes. Before the commotion of my pre-6 a.m. playlist, before my morning ritual of emptying my entire jewelry box to find the necklace that best complements my (probably) black outfit, I’m slowly finding it more natural to confront my fears in a positive, focused manner.

In the spirit of intention, I’ve embraced the idea that you should like what you damn well like, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else thinks it’s hip. Recently at an outing with a friend, I was amid one of my usual, “I love tennis! I love Arabic! I love dinosaurs! I kick ass at Centipede!” flail fests, and I realized it’s cool to be passionate about a lot of things.

With it, the tangibility of intention has faded in my life. Yeah, I still enjoy the satisfaction of checking another task off my to-do list, but I find myself feeling most productive and purposeful, bizarrely, when it’s 5-something in the morning and two minutes remain of my “Taylor, sit still” time. It’s in those ticking 120 seconds that I feel a little bit more like the intentional, mindful grown-up girl I hope to be.

Errant droplets of tea create a path in my apartment, clinging to the lip of my favorite owl mug until they fall. When I can’t make sense of my life, I pour a mug of tea and pace.

Sometimes as I pace, I find myself trying to strip pivotal conversations of their emotional value; break them down into something formulaic, impersonal. An unexpected application of my English degree.

A few days ago I found myself dwelling on the end of a relationship, rereading old text messages as I admit I’m prone to do. Rather than succumb to the usual, toxic practice of pinpointing specific places I could have been funnier/wittier/smarter/etc., I began diagramming and labeling the verbs in my mind. Intransitive, monotransitive, ditransitive, copula, complex transitive. I plotted the form of each sentence, using colored text, italics and returns to reimagine my pain as a pattern, one I can plot, map and organize.

The terminology I once feared has become not an academic tool, a means of getting an A on the next essay, but a means for visualizing disappointment — proof that my pain exists in tangible, color-codable clarity.

I’m no longer worried about how I could have been funnier/wittier/smarter/etc. I was and am a complete being; my writing, whether it’s a text, tweet, press release or letter, reveals my pattern of thinking, feeling, being.

Tangibly mapping language is proof that my feelings and pain are real — that I’m real. Proof that order can exist amid erratic emotions and hurt that resurfaces when unexpected.

Each familiar sentence form and unconsciously recurring verb form are proof that the only thing I ever am — and will ever be — is authentically, innately me.

The girl who should probably buy a coaster for each piece in her mug collection, regularly spills her tea and diagrams sentences in her free time.

Running and dwelling: I’ve been meditating on the two lately; a strange pair they are. When I run — the physical embodiment of moving forward in pursuit of that faraway goal of the Des Moines Half Marathon in October — I find myself dwelling, immobilized by unmoored thoughts rooted in what was.

I remember the European boy who was mean to me on a 2014 study abroad trip. How I swooned over the two-and-then-some languages he spoke; how he admired my English vocabulary and the obscure words that wind their way into everyday chatter.

I think of the semester of college I spent binge drinking cheap, terrible booze, completely paralyzed by the incident and unable to cope in positive manner.

I relive the time a textbook taught my Arabic class to use the same word for “friend” and “boyfriend,” and I spent an entire week introducing every guy in class as my boyfriend. The dwelling isn’t entirely founded in negative experiences or memories.

This blog emerged on a run, sentences punctuated by moments of breathlessness, some fueled by the exertion, some by the painful memories themselves, I think.

There’s a certain preoccupation with “getting over” things, one that doesn’t give us permission to work through anything on our own timeline.

For me, there is often an extended period of intense, well, ranting. I’m talking swear-word laden, repetitive, teenage-Taylor-worthy rubbish. But every once in a while I find a valuable nugget of wisdom or useful sentence amid that rubbish, something that later leads to a blog post, an essay or simply a day-to-day epiphany.

When I run, I dwell; when I find myself dwelling on something, I run. Maybe it’s dangerous to simulate a sense of progress by physically moving forward while I return to some ‘traumatic’ experience that then felt like the collapse of my proverbial universe. But maybe running is the safe space in which I’m free to ruminate, replay and relive the painful. And when I regain my breath, I often find that I’ve gained perspective.

I’m over “getting over it.” I’m the one running through it.

Pace: It’s not flashy like an inside-out-forehand up the line. It probably won’t suspend breathing in the entire stadium, clay exploding from the court in chaotic, flying flecks. Yet it is, to me, one of the most mesmerizing elements of tennis, one that forever guides me to the inevitable “tennis-as-life/life-as-tennis” comparison that gives the game and reality an opportunity to enter in conversation.

Per my recent decision to run the Des Moines Half Marathon and my tendency to ruminate on the psycho-emotional experience of playing tennis, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about pace. It is the product of control, the result of not one planned, executed shot but many; beauty, defined, in my world.

Tennis has a magical habit of subtly leading me to real-life revelations, the kind I probably couldn’t face without the natural metaphoric power of sport.

There seems to be some distinct, socially sanctioned pace of adulthood, one that I, as fledgling grown-up girl, should instinctively know. In tennis, I can determine the pace of the match; I’ve always liked that about it. The player who controls the pace is generally the player who wins the match.

For a long time, pace in my life felt completely disconnected from pace in tennis. For once I couldn’t find an organic link between my beloved game and my existence beyond it. Tennis had long been my go-to gateway to reflection and self-discovery.

In particular, I kept feeling overwhelmed and bombarded by a single question, the menacing post-grad replacement for, “What are you doing after college?” It surprised me, though maybe it shouldn’t have: “What’s your five-year plan?”

I didn’t (and still don’t) have a five-year plan, and immediately, I felt behind, as if lacking some concrete, bullet-pointed plan meant I hadn’t really achieved pseudo-adult status.

But I think I was more afraid to say I’m happy where I am, and I want to stay here — for a while, anyway. I’m working at an amazing company. I get paid to do cool things like climb on dinosaur exhibits and discuss models of Jupiter made from chocolate cake. Right now, I’m content where I am, and I’m reflecting on it all the while.

That epiphany business is great, but I admit I was long bothered by the lack of an innate connection between tennis and my latest 20-something existential crisis. Then I realized winning in tennis is contingent not only on deciding my own pace but neurotic present-ness, too.

When pro players talk strategy for their next match, “one shot at a time,” “in the moment” rhetoric inevitably surfaces. Don’t think about the title, the trophy, the rebel thrill of writing on the TV lens with your favorite pink Sharpie (come on, admit it, that looks fun); throw every ounce of energy and focus into the present hit. That’s it.

Well, that’s where I am in life right now, too. I’m throwing my energy and passion into my work, my volunteering, my running and my tennis. Will I write my five-year plan eventually (alphabetized and color-coded, of course)? Yeah, I will. But for right now, I’m cool with my own pace and my own neurotic present-ness.

I wish I could tell you I write best at some colossal, oaken desk with a Tiffany lamp tossing multicolored shadows on charmingly worn paper. That was novelist-wannabe Taylor’s mental portrait of a “real” writer, anyway.

Writing owned a certain glamour then. It was something fancy, something many would aspire for but few would realize. I grew up throwing that little word in front of “writer” — “aspiring,” that is. Without the looming desk and the dim study, without the crinkled paper, I couldn’t be a “writer.”

When I reached college, though, writing became not some distant goal but a conscious act of survival.

And survival sure as hell isn’t always pretty. It means sitting on the floor with a fourth mug of Earl Grey at my side. It means mumbling, “Michel Foucault, I hate you. But I kind of love you, too. Damn it.” It means composing a cliché rant following some “end of the world” (but not really) heartbreak — and having the good sense to revisit it with my red pen and briefly abandoned logical self.

As I slowly traded my idealized portrait of the “writer” for my own messier reality, I let go of that little word altogether. I am not an “aspiring” writer.

I am a writer; I always have been. And I don’t need a gargantuan desk or a best-selling novel to tell me who or what I am. Writing is my source of income, yes, but above all it’s a source of survival and a state of being.