Dear Starry Souls,
If this year has taught me anything it’s that we often go through transformative experiences without realizing the full extent of it all until we are out of it.
I had told my therapist a couple of sessions ago: “It’s like my body has adjusted to everything before my mind could even process it.”
I think that a lot of us could probably relate to that this year. Our lives seem to ask us to keep moving forward without pausing to take everything in. Sometimes it asks us to treat it like nothing for us to continue to be something. But then where does that leave us?
Maybe it has left you waking up and realizing they aren’t the first thing on your mind anymore when the sun rises.
Maybe it has left you sitting across from an old friend and realizing you’re no longer a part of the conversation.
Maybe it has left you with the very thing you had wished for just two years ago and somehow it doesn’t feel like everything you had imagined.
I will tell you that it has left me looking around and realizing just how much dead skin I have shed. I am currently at the part where I’ve realized I have made different choices—choices I would have never made before. As a result, everything that was once familiar is no longer here. I feel so unsure if I am doing it all right. If it’s even worth it to continue to lose all that once made me feel comfort—especially when it hurts.
But there is everything I don’t see yet. How in time, I will eventually see how I am finally choosing to actively live the life I have always wanted. That before—I thought I wasn’t deserving of it. All the good that is waiting for me. And now I am acting from a true sense of worth.
It’s hard to not focus on all I seem to have lost or stepped away from. But I think about how much I used to fear and hope to be where I am today, and how I’ve made it despite what I had believed. I think about all the love that has continued to stay and how grateful I am for it. I think about how only in time does everything happen.
I hope maybe we can take this time to rest and fully settle into how far we’ve come. To take in this past year with open arms with all the emotions that come with it. And to keep the door open for all that is to come.
With love,
Leah K. Tran
P.S. I promise to return if your door remains open for me!