A Change

Our brain is who we are. It is a thing, compiled of other things. A thing so intricate that it takes a fairly large portion of a person's life to truly understand how the big lump thing works. It is a puzzle, with each piece personifying aspects of our entirety. But yet, if you were to slice it open, it would look like a wet, crumbled ham. (Really? we depend on a wet, crumbled ham to function?)

It's a keepsake to our memories, a vault for the parts of ourselves we keep from society's eye; It is cluttered with fragmented thoughts and debris of people we've loved and lost. This ham burdens our trauma, and creates this protective barrier between us and the deepest manifestations of our hearts referred to as our "comfort zone", which claims to keep us safe but ends up trapping us within the perimeters of our fears. Sometimes, it even likes to convince us that we aren't safe, when in all reality, we are.

My brain was programmed to survive before it knew truly what it meant to feel alive. The lenses I admired the world through were distorted by coping mechanisms, self-preservation, and any desperate attempt to keep myself alive, and safe, from everyone and everything. I didn't want to hurt anymore, and that's all I knew.

However, As I was hiding from the worst outcome of my fears, I was also in places where happiness couldn't find me. Ironic, isn't it? That you have to risk being vulnerable to the turbulence of everything that could go wrong, for the chance that it might not go wrong-- That you might actually make it out alive, and happy? This is some real-life Brene Brown bull**** nobody signed up for.

But, as the saying goes "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink". So, there isn't an inspiration sequence of words that will heal you, and promise you everything will be alright. You will remain stagnant in your self-limiting beliefs until your priorities change: when you want something more than you fear it; when you want to be loved more than you fear heartbreak; when you want success more than you fear failure; when you want to be embraced for your authenticity more than you fear rejection. And you will have to keep choosing the version of yourself waiting to welcome you with open arms-- beyond what you've been condition to know--over and over again: no matter what happens. I don't know who you are, but that version of yourself is so eager to meet you, and you deserve to meet them.

This is when I decided to look at this world filled with uncertainty through the lens of my heart. You see, our heart holds no recollection of what we fought through. It embodies innocence, and it is quite poetic actually-- how it encourages you to chase happiness, love, passion, and every other emotion that allows us to cultivate true beauty and meaning in our lives as if you have never been touched by pain. It is the sanctuary where we are encouraged to embrace the aspects of ourselves that want to grow through persistently climbing out of our rock bottoms; that want's to learn through failure; that longs for connection through loneliness; that wants to remain hopeful and curious of what tomorrow brings despite the hardship of today. Most importantly, our heart is the only thing that hasn't given up on us coming back home to who we are.

We are defined not by the things we cannot control, but how we choose to perceive them. We as humans are only an accumulation of how we chose to cope with the bad days and embrace the good ones. It's never too late to change our outlook of this world, and when you finally choose to rewrite yourself from scratch, I cannot promise you it will be easy. You will have to abandon everything you thought you knew. It will challenge your self-trust. You will be confronted by all you tried to hide from yourself. You will bend to the point of breaking, and maybe you'll even break, but rebuild yourself with the strongest parts of every situation and remember what you're doing this for: A chance to begin agian, and to fall in love with being alive.

When you do make this decision though, make sure to take before and after pictures because I can promise you this: you will be unrecognizable.