twenty-eight.

I turned twenty-eight this week, and if I’m honest, just as it was with the preceding year, I never thought I would ever get this far. I’ve grown accustomed to the spaces that seem to juxtapose and collide with one another each time I find something worth celebrating. It comes off so much as a lamenting joy. A quiet triumph of a sob that holds weight in the being and understanding that in all things, gratitude endures.

There will always be things to be grateful for, and there will always be things to despair. Yet timeliness is everything, and I feel that the older I get, the more I seemingly learn to accept and understand, that becoming is far better the story than a particular capture and moment in time. That each day of endurance is a celebration of all things. That the lessons we carry or stories we cannot seem to shake, define and will continue to rise within us, to grow the world around us.

I was unexpectedly taken back to a difficult time of my early-twenties this week, but have been reminded of the courage that comes, through fellowship and loving recollection with the people who have stood the test of time and have endured. Resiliency is a word I have come to loathe and hate. It has become an unwilling descriptor for the spaces that have come my way, yet the tenderness that comes from harsher storms, is something I pray I never take for granted or be complacent about.

I was filling out a form and listed friends as references who I have known for a decade. I would have never thought it could ever be possible for me, and perhaps in a seemingly non-descript way, I am slowly living the life I never allowed myself to have. There is still so much more to go, and so much more that I am holding myself back and away from, but I pray with this new year, courage may continue to find me, to break into spaces I have not been able to shatter through, and love and life coalesce to an opportunity for me to once again redefine the art of simply keeping happy.