Some Things I Learned In 2018

• You can lose a good friend without knowing the how or the why.
• When you lose a good friend, it will remind you of all of the other people that you have lost. And you will grieve all over again for people you haven't been close to in a decade.
• Trauma is subjective. But it finds all of us.
• Growing where you are planted is hard even after you stop comparing your plot to everyone else's.
• I have a bad habit of defining how I am by the struggle I am facing. Do I even exist if life gets easy?
• I am trying to begin to define life by my questions and curiosities of which there are many. But I still don't know how to communicate any of that when someone asks "how are you?" because I don't expect them to care or understand especially when my curiosity has led me to do something like reading a couple dozen gardening books in rapid succession.
• I don't need to justify my curiosity, I need to follow it.

On Hope As Rebellion

I am not upset at growing older. I feel as though I have won each of my years from an unwilling benefactor, wrestled them from the giant's grasp, stolen them from Father Time.

Each day is an accidental miracle. Each month is a tricky victory. Each year, a gift that I've struggled to give myself. I will not be made to feel guilty for what I have taken from life, for the youth I have left behind, for the way my body has begun to creak with all of the signs of use. I am certain that some days did not want me to keep waking. And yet my eyelids still open with the barest whisper saying:

I am still here.
I am still curious.
I am still learning.
I am still becoming.

And that is the closest to hope that I have felt in a long time.