Let the hard days be hard

We haven’t even been in New York City for a month, and it feels like my world has exploded. We expected a life shift from the move. A new setting always requires new routines, new understandings, new ways of being and breathing and going with the flow. But lately, it has felt like my heart has been split open. Like a cold blade going through an apple, from its stem, through its core, and down to its base. Exposing its flesh and its juice, its glistening truths, and left to rot until it disintegrates and decomposes into the world. This is heartache. It’s been a long time since I felt this pain. But I remember that it taught me how much I can endure. Maggie Smith wrote in her most recent book that we’re all nesting dolls - carrying versions of ourselves from the past, wherever we go.

I carry the little girl in me, who used to rub skin lightening lotion all over her body until it burned, hoping it would help her escape the constant bullying from classmates about the darkness of her skin.

I carry the teenager who was kidnapped and raped at a hotel in Port Arthur, Texas, and lost her voice when she wasn't believed.

I carry the girl in her 20’s who moved to New York City to disappear, but instead, found herself unfolding and learning to take up space, and helping others do the same.

I carry the woman in her 30’s who fell into a love that she thought only few were lucky to experience - the kind of love where you both hold the doorframe through all the earthquakes.

I carry the woman who endured two births that could’ve killed her, and who mothers fiercely to give her children - these little bitty, squishy versions of herself - a life of love, care and self-acceptance, the next iteration of her lineage.

And I carry the woman who moves through life every day with intention. Love has become her lens on the world, on space and time - a pinhole through which new light enters to create space for the new ways of being that she otherwise would have never known.

All of these versions, all of these reincarnations of myself, are telling me now to let the hard days be hard. I wonder how many of us are out there, walking through life holding so much pain, and hiding it. There's an unspoken shame about it - as if we're never supposed to openly disclose our sadness or grief. As if strength is only applauded in the aftermath, rather than the messy middle. Who wants to hear about that, we think. Isn't it better to just suffer in isolation, we think. But there is nothing wrong with us, nor what we hold inside - for our heart, dear Reader, is doing what it's supposed to do. And that is to simply work. You are not alone.

Perhaps I will write about it one day. But for now, I sit here, watching the sun beam its brightest shades as it settles into the hills far ahead, and the night sky trickles over the cerulean blue of the day, and I am reminded that a beginning is tucked inside every ending. We can be brave and see it through. My mother has told me it's in our genes.

"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another." -- James Baldwin