Youthful Life: X

"Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves." Matthew Desmond For much of my life I learned I was supposed to care about others more than I did myself. I think I took it to an extreme. I learned how to prioritize other people, to make them feel good, and to ensure their peace. Most my time was spent thinking about how to cater to others, to communicate to them them that they mattered to me, and to gift all that I could to them. In striving to be selfless I lost my self. I lost myself in other people. I lost me in their hardships, heartbreaks, and horror. It wasn't that I didn't know who I was, but my self-definition had been relational. I was me, but only in proximity to others. I was me by connection. I was always so and so's brother, friend, uncle, boss, advisor, confidant, fixer, protector, advocate, ally, activist, and, and on, and on, ad naseum until I was nauseated. It wasn't even

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world." Harriet Tubman Do you dream? Do your dreams scare you? Are you dreams wondrous, magnificent, awe-inspiring? Do your dreams seem phantasmagorical, sublime, or surreal? Dreams in this literal and figurative connotations are significant to our experiences. Dreams let us imagine worlds, lives, and instances where the impossible becomes plausible. Dreams are critical to our grasping of what we are capable of. What do our dreams say about us? Are we paying attention? Are we noticing patterns? Are we taking actions to interpret the messages our dreams are communicating to us? Dreams are a manifestation of our subconscious. The part of ourselves that lies deep beneath the surface and speaks to the essence of both who we are, who we're afraid of, and who we're striving to be. What happens when we take serio

" The failures that you beat yourself up over are the ones where you experienced warning signs and can connect the dots backwards after the fact." Caroline Ghosn Searching, yearning, looking for a sign. In the world around us, and the people that occupy it, we look for signs. Some kind of guidance, advice on who to be, or just affirmation that we are doing what we should be. There's this pressure, learned, and applied liberally that tells us there's both a right and a wrong way to exist. There's a values judgement applied to us and who we are. There is an assessment that we are constantly placing on ourselves, and onto others, and them unto us as to the righteousness of what we do. We look for signs to make sense of what goes on around us, about why the world is working the way it is, and about who we're meant to be. Signs have this power to both obscure, and to provide clarity when we seemingly need it most. Signs are all open to our interpretation. We