one day, despite everything, a really clear and present peace will descend on you. you will find yourself almost retroactively feeling that peace as it happens: you'll realize it's been a few minutes or hours or days since you Thought About It. you'll notice that you're actually fully relaxed and you've been relaxed for a little while. that while today might just be a normal day, it felt like a normal day - it was a little tiring, but not overly so; there were moments of fun in there, and you got to see a little bit of beauty. you will realize that in between the self-help books you've "read" (glanced over) and the podcasts and the journaling, this moment is the tip of a long and beautiful ship you've been swimming towards for years now. you will realize: you've been teaching (coaching, parenting, punishing-sometimes, but ultimately yes - loving) yourself to see the beauty in the world, and now you do it almost automatically, by rote. you will realize that happiness is not just the wild abandon of summer; the concerts and the parties and the beaches. happiness is like love: it is gentle and soft, unassuming. it is confident and ready, a stable and earnest peace that is not the brittle holding-fast of your childhood but instead a real and impenetrable wall; a thing that once-felt cannot be dismissed. a thing that will always be there, in a sense, or at least will be something you could always make again - and you know this because you built it.
in that place you will finally find yourself. when you were little and decided enough was enough and decided you would survive this and decided that you were the master of your own fate: the person waiting for you in this peace is the version of you that you wished on. you looked years into the future and knew it would take work and diligence and failure. that you would be scrambling and backsliding. and you still said, back then: i want to meet who i am when i'm happy.
and oh, my love. it will be so worth it, all that waiting.
