It passed his lips so quickly I almost didn’t get the sentiment as it flew past my ears, catching the tiniest remnant of flesh, making sure I got the point. “The world was made for me,” he said without knowing fully what that meant for him and everyone he came in contact with. The energy of a world made for him must have felt so empowering. His whole life he knew, and was told repeatedly he could walk through this world in a way not many of us can. Without a certain type of fear. A fear that reminds you daily who you are. What your limitations and bounds are. We’re told from the beginning how to operate here. How to be. How to be with another.

She was taught by her grandmother to keep quiet and obey. They had the power to make life difficult. They had the power to make her go away forever if they wanted, and her grandmother had felt it in her bones since she was able to breathe. She just didn’t realize the feelings were not supposed to take hold in her body the way they had. This wasn’t the natural order of things, although we think it is. Eat the weak. If that logic were to play out, we’d be left with no one. We’d all kill each other. So what’s the real drive to dominate, to win?

Her body moved to a beat she didn’t create. One placed upon her by the ones that loved and used her. She knew nothing else. She ate, drank, and breathed a world not of her choosing. One that felt alien and alone, full of souls wandering around blinded by the darkness in front of them. Unable to see the light. The thing is that most already lost in the darkness have sometimes only ever experienced it, nothing else. It’s all been dark. In those cases, how and where do the feelings come from to want more than that darkness?

Those feelings, that drive for light must come from somewhere deep inside. Somewhere, maybe we don’t need to see or even understand; we need just be aware that it is and doesn’t come first from an external.

I think a lot of us think we have to choose. We had to choose to be. To be like them. To obey. To fall in line. A carbon copy of what’s next to me so that I’m easier to take. Easier to control and dominate. Easier to make me what you want me to be. Not what I choose. Certainly not to make it easier to understand me.

Most don’t even know they have a choice to choose something that makes them feel good instead of the weight so heavy that it naturally crushes most of the light begging to come out.

Pressure creates transformation. That is all. Does a diamond get to choose what it becomes? Diamonds have extremely specific variables to become. They need proper time, carbon, pressure, temperature, environmental conditions, and geological activity to become the crystalline they are. We, too, have specific variables we’re born into. Things passed down through our ancestors and DNA. Our blood there is no denying, however, all of us have been blessed with choices and we hear them inside if we let them speak to us. If the noise of everything around doesn’t drown her out.

We get to choose how to let the information outside of us affect the outcome of our behavior.

Meaning we have natural drives toward certain behaviors but also have the choice to continue to take them on as is or transform them into something different. We make choices every day to flip the script or not. We all want to feel better in our skin and this world.

As a little girl looking up, I saw wild. I saw fight. I saw confusion of self. I saw being pressed upon. I saw the expectations she felt she was supposed to uphold and how awkward it looked on her sometimes when in a second and out of nowhere, she would realize what she was being, an act put on by only a piece of her, not the whole of her, and why? What and why was she trying to be instead of just being? How had that drive become so innate,  natural, and automatic without her knowing?

It ran the show, drove the bus, and made all the decisions, but she didn’t even understand what would happen in moments when she knew in her heart and brain what to do, spending countless hours rehearsing it over and over. But inevitably, because of things happening in her external energy field bumping up against her pain, she would unwillingly fold into it, unable to come to. To step up and out of it.

The ability to choose sincerity in action and not just in theory takes practice, but once integrated, makes all the difference. It feels more complete. 

Not disregarding what’s already inside and previously conditioned but instead- loving those pieces too. Understanding they are the part bruised by humans, figuring just like she was. No excuses, just truth, so the path forward illuminated and choices much more vast.

It was 18 months before I started feeling somewhat of a semblance of myself again. It’s like she peeked through this tiny little rip in a thin veil of biological goop with a hard shell. Its translucency so inspiring from the inside, I look up into what I know has an exterior.

I know there’s an environment out there, but from my perspective, it’s so incredibly shrouded and blurry. It’s interesting seeing the figures bouncing around you, sometimes moving, sometimes still in their abstraction. My brain tries so hard to put together the pieces. To try and understand what the forms are saying. What they’re trying to tell me. What they are, and why they are there.

I think they’re familiar, but the anxiety produced in my body makes me realize that not knowing is the hardest part. And fuck we’ve got to be OK with that. We’ve got to be OK with not knowing. We’ve got to be OK with the spaces in between the pain and the joy.

It took me I don’t even know how long to get to the point of being able to tickle the tips of my fingers on the edge of that light. Once I did, I realized the feeling it produced in my body when I touched it was electrifying, filling my senses in a way I didn’t understand anything could.

I swiftly reached up with my other hand eagerly searching for edge when I found it.

The edge was the literal in-between.

The edge is the precipice.

The edge is moving from one thing into the next. It’s essential to cross over to the other side. I embraced the realization and with everything in my being burst through my imposed shell integrating it all. Letting things evolve…as they may.