This Year, We Survived

A year started with two weeks stuck in time. A year of discovering inner resources through hours of pendulating loneliness and solitude, teaching us confinement is a condition of the spirit. We found pieces of that spirit were fragmented; we pieced them together like a puzzle on the coffee table. We kept the things alive that kept us alive like watered plants on the balcony—cultivating friendships withered by time, tending to roots through which sprouted the sweet fruits of our labor. Fruits that survived the winter to thrive in the spring.

A year we showed our true colors, and it is not what surfaces as a trauma response. Because what doesn’t kill you doesn’t always make you stronger; what doesn’t kill you can make you doubt—the powerful doubt of a powerful mind. What doesn’t kill you makes you shame, pity, deny, and blame until you hold it in your hand and give it a name. And if in the pits of despair you forget to find a silver lining, know that it is there.

There is a subtle power in the ability to withstand hardships, to bend and fold yet never break, the ability to make a product of your environment instead of just becoming one. In a society that values external postures of success, the battles won inside often go unnoticed. It is those victories that stick with you for a lifetime. Resilience rewards persistence. Resilience resists resistance. Resilience is sensational. Resilience is generational. Resilience reflects off the skin like melanin.

A year we survived against the odds like a rose that grew on the sidewalk when no one else cared. From foreclosed duplexes in San Diego to timberland childhood homes in Connecticut, we stopped searching for stability and started creating it. A year we bet on ourselves. A year we looked uncertainty in the eye and chose to be liberated by it. A year that fired us up before it burned us out.