I turn 20 next month on the eleventh and I feel stupidly old and unwise. Twenty years, two decades — it’s not much, I know, but every time I think about how little I know or how much has proven to be untrue it’s nothing short of a head trip.
I start my last year of undergrad in the fall and I don’t know where I’m headed anymore. Certainty means control and clarity, and I’ve always managed to navigate from the center of the storms when they pass. I go through periods of overwhelming misery and sadness, but I always somehow manage to finally swim away and out of the current. I always feel as if the world could swallow me whole at a moment’s notice and I think for the first time I’m realizing that there isn’t any sort of framework, much less a rescue strategy, for me to work through.
I thought I knew what I wanted and how my emotional and rational being worked after years of trying to figure out what the hell it meant to actually be human and why I was a part of this Earth — but everything I had unlearned and retaught myself stopped making sense around the end of December. But come mid-January when I left home again and went back to school I had found some kind of footing again. Come April, I was broken down again to a level I had never imagined exited.
The thing is that now when I lose all sense of understanding and comprehension of my rational thought, emotions, very essence of being, I fall to a measure that I once thought was something reserved for the dramatics of a desperate plot line in a TV show or book. Grasping at straws, playing to the audience, calling to the heavens in hope of saving face.
I feel as though I’ve learned very little, but of what little I do know I can feel to be the few honest truths that I always manage to find in the rubble after every thing else has fallen apart.
I know that my family is the single greatest blessing and consideration in my life, and that no matter the time, place, universe, whatever, I can conceptualize home and understand love through them. I know not everyone gets a family in a traditional sense, or even if they do it may be the furthest thing from comfort, but I know that eventually we all meet at least one person that somewhat feels like home. Not even necessarily a significant other or a lover of some sort, but simply a soul that doesn’t have to think twice about believing in you.
I know that kindness, consideration, and empathy make me human — and that only through and with them can my presence be felt on this Earth.
I’ve learned that assumptions ruin us and erode our nature; benefit of the doubt is the simplest and kindest human action that you can give any human being. Just teach yourself to default to seeing another’s humanness.
I know that the richness, diversity, and spectrum of life on this Earth are not by accident — we need it. I cannot exist without you or your experiences.
I know that regardless of what I try to appear I will forgive almost anyone and everyone who has wronged me, and even though I know it’s not healthy for me I still do it — and maybe it’s actually okay.
Lastly, I know You to be True, Kind, and Loving. And I pray that somehow I find that within myself.
Best and with care,
Myra
Myra Ali
[email protected]
Briefly in GRX, homed in DFW, founded in ISB, learns in ATX