What They Don't tell You

What they don’t tell you about the whole “try, try again” adage is that sometimes trying again feels like a surefire way to fail again. Sometimes your brain gets so attached to its history of failure that it sees failing as inevitable, maybe even as success.

What they don’t tell you about accepting failure and moving on is that the failure sometimes becomes part of your very fabric. Sometimes the fabric of failure starts to feel like whole cloth. Sometimes that shirt gets so comfortable that you can hardly tell it from your own skin.

What they don’t tell you about falling in love is that sometimes the falling is so terrifying that you’ll grab onto anything to break your fall. Sometimes falling feels like flying until you look down and see the ground rushing up toward you, covered in the broken pieces of last year’s fall.

What they don’t tell you about getting older is that sometimes you forget to act your age and your heart reminds you there’s still a little child inside who’s scared and lonely and bratty and hopeful. Sometimes when you think you’re figuring it all out, the math doesn’t quite work out, you have too much left over and you have to start again, but don’t forget to show your work.

What they don’t tell you about starting over is that sometimes you’re going to make that same mistake again even though it looks like someone new, even though you look like someone new. Sometimes you have to look past the reminders and the blinders and trust that something new is under there, suffocating in that hair shirt, waiting to surprise you.

What they don’t tell you about trust is that sometimes you have to trust someone else to hold your pain so that you can look at it from a little further away and recognize that it’s not really bigger than you, that it was just a trick of the light, that it’s really just a small stone rubbed soft by your worrying hands. Sometimes you can trust and be scared and touch that soft worried spot and slip off that hair shirt and let that stone weigh it down to the bottom of a cold lazy river and miss its scratchy weight and long to join it under the waves and wave goodbye to it and wait to turn away while your goosebumped skin shivers and wish it well and miss it terribly, all at the same time.

What they don’t tell you about life could just about fill this room. And sometimes this room is exactly where I need to be.