A Living Reflection
on choosing hope
There are few months quite as sweet as Brooklyn in June. I suppose I am biased because Brooklyn holds specific memories in tender places. This was the first place I was able to fully come into my queerness, in a genuine, embodied way. Those hazy days of my early twenties twirling in the love and lust of balmy nights shrouded in glitter and tequila. All too often I look back on earlier versions of self and cringe at all I did not know, the ways I could not see myself. Slowly I am developing capacity for a different narrative, one that can look back in compassion rather than judgment.
Living through change is a funny feeling. The in-betweeness of it all, transiting from one way of being and entering into another, frighteningly new iteration. These days I find myself vacillating between the familiar lower vibrations that keep me small and the dreamy grandeur of the woman I am becoming.
Just yesterday, Mikelina pointed out to me the juxtaposition between the way I look versus the way I feel. The hours I spend meticulously curating my outfit, my makeup, the accessories, and how they all converse with another, the perfect pink eyeliner or the sunglasses that complement my strappy heels. These details bring me immense joy and yet the minute I step out of my cocoon and into the world I shrink into myself, I hyper fixate on all the things I am lacking and romanticize the ways other people wear their clothes, carry themselves in their body, and exude a sort of effortlessness. I’m painfully aware of the circus of perceptions at play. While I am lost in this mirror of distortion, someone sitting next to me is projecting their version of fears, anxieties, criticisms onto my body, and so the story goes on.
Now, somewhere on the other side of this exists a secure attachment to self. A self that believes that there is only one version of me, that no matter what other people have or claim, there is no one just like me. What would it be like to embrace that as my reality? The voice of the Judge cowers behind the magic of my growing curiosity.
As gemini season comes to a close and the summer solstice beams upon us I teeter in between shadow and light. I hold on to hope that each day it will somehow get a bit easier to choose light. To see the interconnectivity of all of life and we are but a small part in a great web. To understand it's not personal, and sometimes it's purposeful. I sigh and remember that choosing hope in itself is an act of courage. My highest self believes there is enough for all of us, she prizes collaboration and she knows that competition and comparison are byproducts of scarcity, a belief seeded by capitalism that tells us there can only be a few.
Wayne Dyer reminds us that, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”. This sentiment challenges our complicity in the narratives we believe. In my lowest moments, it can feel like I am a cog in a machine, at mercy to the way others perceive me, awash in a deep skepticism of self with no end in sight. In my brightest moments, I know through trusting my intuition I can create my own reality, I have agency and can choose over and over again to see the light inherent in everything around me, I am a living reflection of love.