Shifting Sand

When I was a child, and much less girly than I am now, I would play in the dirt with my brother and his friends, and make mud pies and leaf stew with my friends. In the summer, my family would occasionally go to the beach, and I'd sit in the sand and play for hours, letting the dry sand sift through my open fingers, digging holes to pour water into, only to watch it be soaked up and carried away.

Only now do I realize how simple life was then, and how much of a metaphor those things would become for my life as an adult. I no longer sit in the grass and dig holes in the ground and play with mud. I hate the feeling of sand in my shoes or stuck to my skin. And watching the sand sift through my open fingers holds sadness for me now, knowing how like life it really is. Watching the water get soaked up by the sand, or swallowed up by the soil only reminds me that all that I try so hard to contribute simply gets swallowed up and drained out just as quickly as I pour it out.

And oh, the pouring out. For thirty years I kept things bottled up inside, and I was so good at it. And then I faltered, stumbled, and the floodgates ripped apart, and I haven't stopped crying since. It's not that my life is so bad. In many ways, I am blessed. But in many ways, I am still hurting from the pain of too many years of trying too hard to be strong, and not hard enough to deal with all of the things I was going through.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have talked about the things I was feeling when I was feeling them, no matter how vulnerable it made me. I would have reached out to someone when I was feeling lost and alone instead of beating myself up for feeling that way when I thought I should have been stronger than that. Even now, I find myself wishing that I had talked to people when things happened in my life that sent me spinning into a world of destruction and pain. And now it's too late to tell those people those things about my life.

This lesson learned is that opportunities often present themselves more than once, but often within the same window. If you numb yourself to the point of not seeing the window when it's open, you will miss the feel of the summer breeze drifting across your skin as you bare your soul to the world.