Closed doors and open doors and right around the corner doors, each encounter filled with a lesson, an experience that grows and perfects.  The strain and the backward glances and the questions all start to dissolve as a heart encounters the Love that tears down walls and burns up boundaries, where every door feels like a blessing, even the closed ones, because they are framed inside of a love unconditional.  Where even the tears feel important because in some way they cleansed and left the heart open again to beauty.  

The forgiven much love much and there is nothing like a hug from the truly grateful.  There’s something about their eyes, how they shine deeper than the sorrow encountered on the journey.  How they let restoration and new dreams fill their hearts with a sensation beyond words.  A hope beyond all reason.  A joy unspeakable that takes hold and doesn’t let go.   They teach you something beyond words.  Something that they carry in their very being, their very DNA, that echoes loudly that loving well is what it all comes down to in the end.  

Sometimes I don’t know how to fight for another’s heart other than with words.  Other than with a poem, a phrase, a quote, a song.  Sometimes my heart feels the injustices around the world, and in searching for a way to show up and change things, all I find myself able to offer today is a prayer.  A prayer and a plan.  A plan that may take years of preparation and sacrifice, but the end is worth it.  Someone once told me that the freedom of many is on the other side of a singular person's obedience.  How obedient must I be to change a nation?  To turn the tide of history?  To turn back time and see the slave set free.  And again my heart feels the cry, “Whatever it takes.  It’s gonna be worth it.”  

Home to Unravel

I'm not sure if it is due to growing up in a christian environment where joy is more acceptable than sadness, or if it is just simply due to being human and avoiding vulnerability, but talking about depression is difficult for me.  The admission of such emotions always feels like defeat, where the only safe place to feel anything remotely broken is on journal pages that no one will ever read.

My view is changing quite rapidly. Depression scares me.  And I don't want to avoid talking about things that have me scared anymore.  It’s like your brain is stuck in darkness and you have no idea how to get the lights back on in there.  I need a brain engineer and mechanic.  Someone to go inside and figure out the faulty wiring and why all my neurons seem to be angry with me right now.

 As I hear stories from friends and acquaintances who have experienced large amounts of loss over the past few years, I realize that until there are safe places to be honest about feelings of deep sadness and grief, the healing won't come as naturally as it could and should to bring people to the other side, where they experience both joy and fresh perspective again.  And when I think about being honest about feelings, I don't necessarily mean using lots of words.  Just being given space and time to really feel all the feelings and not be viewed as forever weak.

Home seems to find a way of uncovering things I always run from with the next great adventure or idea.  But maybe I always return home because out of all the billions of people in the world and the hundreds of major cities where I could live and find community, there are only three people out of those masses who understand my story down to the gritty detail (those three people are my siblings).  Maybe they’ve interpreted things differently than me, but their experiences and mine are known to each other on a different level than when I try to get to know a friend.  And the truth is, all the friends I knew growing up knew me when my life was in survival mode and included an instinct to hide.  So whoever I am now is not the person I was then, and as much as I wish I could take those friends with me throughout life, it doesn’t seem probable or even possible.  

Maybe to survive I need to make peace with this place and with who I’ve been up to now so that I can become something new.  Which is why I don't want to run into the next adrenaline rush adventure until I know the tears I need to cry have been cried and the healing meant to come in this season has come.  

When I close my eyes, I want to again see open fields and smiling faces in all the nations where I want to one day travel.  I want to wake up wanting to be here.  Wanting to embrace a new day.  I want to feel again the passion of being alive and the fierce courage in waking up every day believing that my life matters just as much as the billions who occupy space and time with me.  That all of our lives matter.  That we aren't just organic chemistry and atoms strewn together.  We're the ones who get to breathe and feel and remember.  There must be a point to it all.  There must be a point to me.  To you.  To us.  Something powerful and wise and strong in the big picture of it all that includes us.  

So to those bordering the land of the living and of the dead, who have discovered the place called grief, may we be met with strength and vision to keep going and to find meaning while also feeling the missing.  Feeling the morbid and the unknown and the unfinished.  Feeling the lack of closure and hearing the questions that yell loud yet often remain in the heart, mind, body...unheard.  And may we start to realize that grief unprocessed is often heard in chronic disease, in stress, in depression and insomnia and panic attacks.  As a culture, I hope we begin to recognize the great need and strength found in giving people moments to be weak, to be honest with what hurts and let the healing come.  

May we give ourselves permission to sit down for a second (or as long as it takes), take a breath, regather energy at the cellular level, and regain hope.  

"Pry it open with your love/ it is steep, it is stone, such recovery/it has found what we orphaned/

...your love is known, I'm standing up on it."

 -Bon Iver

October, Welcome Back

After my birthday month, this may be my favorite month of the year.    There is something crisp and alive in October, especially as the mid-eastern part of the States begins to feel fall again.

The winds are welcome to blow through this whole place, through my whole heart, shaking off all the dead leaves so that new ones have a chance to grow after the cleansing freeze.

Ah seasons.  How much hope I find in the change.  In the fact that the earth rotates and the sun gets further and closer and we get the chance to find poetic meaning in it all.

Cheap wine, dessert made from a chocolate bar stuffed inside a day old butter croissant, a bed scattered with Rumi and my Bible that has barely been opened over the last few months and a journal with few entries even though its purpose was to document the past few months of life...

 and a billion thoughts firing all over the place in my brain, seeking for some sort of stilling.  That is what makes up my evening.  What's been making up my evenings for the past few months.

Some people disbelieve me when I try to tell them how depression has been a foe and friend of mine since before I hit my teens.  It's like a fog and a clarity all at the same time, and in a strange way its arrival at moments of my life feels like a dysfunctional comfort.  I've battled and surrendered often to an existential angst and sadness more often than people tend to believe, and I'm still learning how to ride the wave when it hits like a hurricane and no one seems to know how to reach me out in the water.

If I knew the pursuit of medicine was going to be such a challenge, I wouldn't have started the journey. That makes me grateful that the initial decision was made without seeing the future.  But reality and my track record pretty much convince me that even if I stuck with journalism and filmmaking, I would still be hitting depression turbulence.  It has nothing to do with my career choice.  It has to do with me and how I feel everything and how I go through the highs of wanting to change the world met with the lows of realizing how broken everything feels.  

There must be something good that comes out of all these thoughts.  I even want to believe that there is a reason for disappointments and dashed hopes.  Still waiting for that revelation and transformation.  In the meantime, thank God for Langston Hughes. And I'm sorry to all my friends to whom I have been unresponsive and absent.  I just haven't had any energy to even look at my phone on days.  I will return soon.  I can't promise that, but I feel it to be true.  Hopefully my sense of humor and wonder are on their way back as well.

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams.
For if dreams go,
Life is a barren field
Covered with snow.

~ Langston Hughes

Big Eyes

I wonder about him.  About those big eyes -- how they drink in the world. When will they recognize the things not innocent?  The humanity of this place and how decisions create a certain way to the space that is different from the original.  Not bad.  Just imperfect.

 Still beautiful.  Still worth drinking in.

And I want to be wanted.  To be understood.  To have a heart known and chased after.  Yet fleeting infatuations and momentary obsessions seem like a high price to pay when looking at a long term self that's being made. Looking north but feeling tugs east and west.  Knowing deep down that the fleeting things will hurt and that pain and rejection can't be avoided, but that the lasting things will still call out to me even when crossing into detours.   And that faith in the calling out, that the voice will always find its way to remind me,  is what puts courage into the step.  It leaves the second guessing and the escape routes and the obsessing over Plan B and closed doors in the trash.  They don't matter when love is the motivation.  Because you can't get so far that you can't come back.  You can't go so deep that you can't come up for air.  Even when it feels that way.  Even when feelings of rejection try to steal your sense of dignity.  Your courage.  Your belief that you matter.  Even then the strength somehow finds you.  Urges you to believe again.  To keep going.  To not surrender forever to the weakness and doubt.

I want eyes like his.  Drinking it all in.  Fear gone.  Reservations gone.  Obsessions with being liked and understood gone.  Rejection's heaviness in the way it makes you feel like you are a small person who doesn't matter-- gone.

love drives you on

Physics is over!  Well, at least for a semester.  Celebration will involve lots of art: films, photography, writing, books...whatever I can do to feed my right brain!

As I was studying today before the final exam, I was freaking out over how I thought I knew formulas but they felt like they weren't coming together and questions like, "What if I fail?  What was the point of even moving here if I can't even pass this class?" were hitting me hard.

And then a thought stopped me in my tracks.  Well, more like a picture that found words and became a thought.

A memory came back to me. A memory of children-- children I've  had the honor to meet in my life in communities where education isn't readily available.

And my thoughts turned toward a little girl, one much like the girls I read about last year in a class I took regarding human trafficking.  A girl working insane hours every day of the week, all of her youth poured into another person's dreams.  In her situation, education isn't even an option.

Yet there I was, sitting with a laptop, surrounded by stacks of notes and a formula sheet that demonstrate three months of knowledge gained from getting to sit in a classroom in one of the greatest universities, surrounded by curious and hard working students.  With the opening of a tab and the click of a mouse, I have access to worlds of knowledge that can cause growth and expansion in my life.  That's my reality.  

The contrasting picture-turned-thought produced a reality check: whether I fail the exam or not, I am still finishing this semester with information that will stick with me forever, and I've grown in my understanding of science, which in turn has given me an even greater appreciation for life, seeing motion in deeper ways.

Education is a gift to be appreciated and valued--but not one that should be restricted. Doesn't the opportunity to learn make me in some way indebted to the girl who is giving her life unwillingly for another's dream?  There is a difference between a bond slave and slave.  The first has a choice, the latter does not.  She does not.  But what if I can make myself a bond slave to her?  What if she and I are connected more deeply than can be imagined, and what if the very nature of opportunity is meant to equip in order to give back, to give those without hope of rescue a chance? I can't help but feel that I have a responsibility to her.  A responsibility to take my studies seriously.  To see this time as a gift.  To recognize that training is a place of expansion, so that I can then go and use what I've gained as an offering to those who may never have a chance unless I both care and prepare.

 Love is a different motivator than ambition, but love still drives a heart to pay a price because the end result is worth it. And I want to learn Love in that way.  And I want to become love in that way-- to "turn our prayers into outrageous dares" as Jeff Tweedy would say.  To believe that my small life and your small life, and our small lives together, can really matter to the beautiful hearts in the world who don't yet know freedom.

So Glad You Exist

My mom is a sign language interpreter by profession.  Growing up, she placed a strong emphasis on non-verbal communication-- mainly body language and eye contact.  She taught my siblings and me that much is conveyed in the absence of words.

Currently I work in retail in a wealthier community in the Boston area.  Lately, I feel like I am a sociologist, observing the lifestyle of the entitled.  One thing that strikes me on a constant basis is how the tone a person uses and the way they make eye contact totally shapes an interaction.  Each interaction has its very own personality-- and there is a struggle I face each time I am treated rudely with how I will respond.  Will my response reshape the interaction in a positive direction?  Will I be proud of my response when I look back on my day?  Often my pride gets in the way of responding well, and instead I get short with the customer, thinking somehow my curt attitude will vindicate the ill treatment.

 However, when someone treats me kindly, acknowledging I am not just a cashier but indeed a person-- a person with goals, dreams, a brain -- something in me rises to the occasion, wanting to exceed their every expectation in return for their kindness.  Their kindness empowers me.

I'm a strong believer in the idea that even when someone is rude to you, you should not respond in kind.  There is something about love that chooses humility in such situations (which I often do not do).  But at the moment, I'm not wanting to write an essay on turning the other cheek. My thoughts are turned towards what kindness does to a heart.

I was walking home from work today and as a woman passed me,  she looked up from her carefully placed footsteps, treading wisely on freshly fallen snow, to catch my eye and exchange a smile.  That meant so much to me-- an acknowledgment of my personhood.  That I matter.  That the space I take up on the sidewalk is a beautiful part of her day, as her space is to mine.  That her existence is a wonderful thing. An exchange of strangers that validated how each of us is made up of the same set of bones, the same muscles, the same organs...that inside of us blood is running and a heart is beating and feet are moving to get us from one place to the next.  We may be in a different economic class, but we are not in a different human class.  We are equal.

I'm not sure why at 27 I am back in school, trying to go to medical school, unsure what will come of this journey, still wanting to write made up stories with characters that translate beyond words and into hearts but searching for a way to bring it all together.  I'm also not sure why at 27, lots of my friends are married, starting beautiful families, setting off on stable careers, but I am still a single wanderer who wants to live a life of meaning but is searching for what that exactly means within the grace that is on my life, all while working at a minimum wage job after going to college for four years, often having to depend on and receive the kindness of others.  I wasn't raised to believe that marriage is the answer to a girl's life and that finding a man is what defines your success or brings security, so I think that there is something in me that recognizes a longing for the companionship of another who gets my heart in a way no one else will on this great life adventure, but doesn't want it to be a savior from my current season--although I do look forward to the day when that piece in my journey comes. For now though, I want to live this season out in all its gore and glory, to feel it fully, as it leads to whatever is next on my journey and as it develops something in me that is focused and sure.

But where there are many things I'm not sure of, there is one thing I know for sure I want to do with my life, and it is this--
I want to look each person I meet in the eyes.  I want them to know I acknowledge them, that I am honored to meet them, that I celebrate the space they occupy.  I want the translation of my look to say, "You are beautiful and I am so glad you exist," regardless of their income, if they had a shower in the last week, if they live in the most beautiful house, or in a cardboard box.  Because there is justice found in our silent communication-- there is a power beyond words that restores dignity and offers a warmth that reaches deep into the soul.