raise your words.

raise your words, not your voice. it is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. 

-rumi

on a train saturday afternoon a friend said something that made me realize how lucky i am to have her in my life. 

"i'm so glad you're saying how you feel." 

to have someone in your corner encouraging you as you take baby step by bigger step to finding and becoming yourself.

i have a lot of these someones.

for the longest time i didn't say how i felt. then i did and most of it was sad, but i was saying the words, heavy and sad as they were. and the lifting them from my bones helped. in time, it helped. now i feel so much joy and gratitude in my life that i can't stop saying it out loud. i want to say it all the time.

this has been my path. messy and hard and dark. but light always came through the cracks, even when i wasn't able to see it. when i wasn't ready to see it. this is the start. my path is not over yet.

there's so much light in my life. but there's also some dark. those are the things i can't see or predict or control. and learning to accept and embrace both the light and the dark is something that takes time. it's hard. i believe and hope that time and learning make things less hard.

i acknowledge my feelings. i articulate them. i write them down. all of these things give the words power.

sometimes people don't like when you stop being who you were. they count on you for certain things. this is what we do. we need people to be who they are. we want them to stay this way. that's something you must accept. 

you cannot always be everything to everyone. 

we belong to ourselves first.

joan didion said, "i write entirely to find out what i'm thinking, what i'm looking at, what i see and what it means. what i want and what i fear.” 

raise your words. give yourself that power.