Illumination reflects everywhere I look

Ten years ago, I never expected my life to look like it does now. In fact, I don't remember exactly what I was like, but I do remember I was a pretty dumb eleven year old, so I probably had some kind of crazy expectations for 21 year old me. 

I was still dancing then. I had just made a performing dance company that I was pretty proud of. I probably expected to become a professional one day, and maybe travel around teaching dance workshops like so many of the ones I was a student in.

I wasn't awesome at school, but it came pretty easy, and math and science were my favorite. I probably had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but it was most likely something in the field of genetics, what my mom did before she had kids.

I was pretty sensitive about gender discrimination, especially because I felt like I came up against it a lot. I don't remember if I disliked boys, or if it was the fact that boys didn't really like me, or if it was just a general attitude of self disdain, but I remember being pretty adamant that I would be everything a boy was, only better. I probably thought that was possible.

I remember looking at older married people through the eyes of an analytic 11-year-old and concluding that marriage was little more than putting up with someone you found incredibly boring and annoying. I said I was never falling in love or getting married, because it was little more than initial satisfaction traded for permanent misery. I probably believed that, too.

I remember going to Guatemala to see Corinne right after she was born, and having my eyes opened to the injustice of people being hungry and oppressed and in need and no one doing anything about it because their lives are unaffected by it. I remember recognizing this incredible gap between what life should be, and what it is. I probably thought I could stand in that gap and make a significant difference about it.

I remember disliking everything about myself: my hair, my height, my weight, my personality, my teeth, my braces, my glasses, my lack of everything desirable and my overwhelming excess of everything disdainful. I probably thought I could change that stuff on my own.

I remember what people thought about me was a very big deal, because I had no baseline for who I was or how good I was at being human. I probably thought the standard was the one people (insert "society") puts out. The one that is in constant flux. The one no one seems to be at but everyone seems to think they can reach if they work hard enough. I probably thought I was such a loser because no matter how hard I worked, I never got there, before it had changed to something else. Yeah. I definitely thought that was true.


Looking back, life isn't really very nice to 11 year olds. I lived in my own world, but here and there I can see, in retrospect, little places in my life that the world was beginning to wear through. I can see the degeneration of truth and the assimilation of lies. I can see the softness of a heart with unreal expectations and the subsequent hardening when it is let down and broken. I can see the innocent hope of what shining prospects life holds, and the bitter disillusionment of finding that it is nothing like they told us. And I can understand the statement "life isn't fair". Because it isn't. And it's never going to be. There's nothing fair about people being capable of destroying each other with words, with ideas, with force, with hate, or with love. And it isn't fair that we are born with the propensity to be so broken. It isn't fair that we are able to rebel against what we were made for and run from the only thing that will make us whole. And it isn't fair that we can re-enter the promise that existing within the place we were created to be gives. And it isn't fair that, after all that we have done, we are still given hope.


Life is hard. It's hard, and it's scary, and it's uncertain and it's cruel, and it's ugly. But morning is most beautiful when the first rays streak across the inky horizon and illuminate what was once unseen. And stars are bright and hard as diamonds against the backdrop of the deep, black void of space. And hope in the middle of the broken, shitty mess that life can be shines out much more clearly when juxtaposed against the insalvageable depravity of what we have become.


Life is hard. Who told us it was supposed to be easy? Good things are rarely easy.

But so much more so than being hard, and ugly, and overwhelming and frustrating, and confusing, and heartbreaking, and any other cruel attribute it possesses, life is beautiful.