Youthful Life: X

“Taking care is one way to show your love. Another way is letting people take good care of you when you need it.” Mr. Fred Rogers There's a difference between feeling like we know people and the actual knowing of them. Oftentimes we mistake the former for the latter. People we have encountered who seem to share themselves with us so freely. We know all this information about them, but that necessarily mean we know them. What makes the knowing real is getting the emotions, the feelings, the experience of living through all those moments. It may cost us something to share our stories but it definitely requires a labor to give the truth of what an experience meant to us. We have to be able to distinguish between knowing and knowing with depth. Maybe we feel connected to people quickly because we are living in a time of strong disconnection. Maybe people have been deprived of substantive connection. Maybe we're not used to people being genuine in their vulnerability with us.  Rad...

10/5/19 Dear Mommy, You are loved. We love you. I love you. You have lived a life well loved. That sentiment of a life well-loved is two-fold. You have been someone who has adored others with a love that can only be described as extraordinary, and been one to have been surrounded by love for all of your days. You were the embodiment of love. You were love exemplified. You were pure love in human form. What a grand gift it was to love and to be loved by you. Your love has been indescribable yet powerful beyond compare. Your love has been transcendent while being grounded. Your love has been everlasting even when we thought it would end. Your love, your love, your love, has changed the world, your world, our world, my world.             Mother to all, this life well-loved is represented by the number of people here and around the world thinking about you in this moment. Your impact is immeasurable. What you meant to people cannot ...

"There are times when explanations, no matter how reasonable, just don't seem to help." Fred Rogers I don't feel anything. I should feel more. Everything is just kind of empty. Ya know, or maybe you don't know. It may be an odd thing to say but I haven't felt the emotion of anger in such a long time. I cannot even the remember the last time I was genuinely mad about anything. There's no rage just beneath the surface. There's no ferocity waiting to come out. There's no burning desire to burn everything down. I'm fine, and that's the problem. I'm just fine. Not great. Not horrible. Just in the middle of meh. To me it's so clear how fundamentally different I am now. After what happened I've changed. I don't know how other people cannot see it. Who I was before no longer exists. I'm a person transformed by, touched by, and most visibly marked by death. I am bathed in it. I smell of it. It's right behind my eyes that ha...

" The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it.  Memories need to be shared.” Lois Lowry Memories are all we have to make life real . Memories are what we cherish to carry all that has come before us. Memories are all that we truly are. What a year. What happened this year? What the actual fuck happened this year? How could this year be real? I have struggled to write this post because life is not some absolute balance weighing the benevolence of this isolated period of time. Simple me wants to say this has been by far the worst year of my life to date. Complex me knows that life not a scale that tips positive or negative. Life has nuance. Life has meaning when we assign it meaning. Life is life.  I think there is profound meaning in memory preservation, and there is immense importance in memory creation. We are tasked with doing both in our lives - holding on to the remnants of the past, and maneuvering to create our presents an...