Everything Will Be OK

The past five or so weeks have been some of the most interesting weeks of my life thus far. I don’t think it’s any stretch of hyperbole to say that I’ve experienced tremendous emotional change in such a short timespan, catalyzed by the people around me who’ve helped me realize and come to terms with my past, reflect on my present, and lay the foundation for my future. We often walk through life so bound by our own perception that we seldom think to untether ourselves from the soil and float far up above to view our present within the context of all the chapters that we’ve written and all the pages that we have left to write.

When we ourselves have such severe tunnel vision, it’s important to remember that there are people who see us from an outside point of view, and it’s important to remember that letting others see into our battles is not a weakness, but a strength. It’s not that we’re letting others fight our battles for us, it’s that we are each helping each other fight our own battles, empowering each other, and giving each other the strength to fight, to persist, and to persevere for ourselves. It is not dependence, but humanity. It’s love, it’s kindness, it’s friendship, and it’s so much more.

"Everything Will Be OK," by ΑΣ. Depicting us sharing a lovely Friday afternoon on a hilly slope together.

The gentle strumming of calming guitar strings; the easy wind breezing across my masked and somber countenance, displacing a few strands of hair with it; the whites, greens, pinks, yellows, and all the more that come with the drizzling weekends and nighttime showers and the daylight sun; and the crisp grass beneath my rugged boots all come together to paint a picture of spring, the season of rebirth – rebirth, not just for the flowers and the animals and the bees and everything more, but for us.

I don’t know when it started, and perhaps that’s the point: healing is not something that has concretely defined starting and ending points, but just happens. It’s gradual, and it creeps up on us, and we don’t actively look for it – we stumble on it without even knowing it and by the time that we realize it, we’re going through it or perhaps we’ve already gone through it.

Perhaps we’ve just gone through a dark time in our lives. Perhaps we’re bogged down by the past. Perhaps we’ve just been feeling sad and melancholic for no particular reason, or perhaps we don’t understand the reason.

One thing leads to another. Perhaps it starts with an innocuous holiday message sent to a far off someone you know but don’t truly know, expecting absolutely nothing of it more than a holiday exchange, and then time passes and months later you somehow find yourselves sharing a warm cuddle and losing time into the night, or laying down on the grassy slope of a hill in a neighborhood park on a lovely Friday afternoon and watching the sky go from blue to orange to black.

Maybe someone who once asked if you wanted to get coffee months ago became your classmate, then groupmate, then friend, and now you look forward to the next conversation you hold over a cup of coffee every week. Perhaps the roommate you had years ago with whom you still keep in contact slowly goes from a distant once-or-twice-a-month to a weekly run-in to a daily conversation. Maybe you finally start talking with someone who, like you, comes off as shy, but you unlock the sides of each other that never find a silent moment in the day and you rattle like two unstoppable chatterboxes, and at some point you call them your friend. So many things keep happening, one after the other after the other after the other…

… and at some point, you learn to smile again. At some point, you learn to be vulnerable and open up to the world again. At some point, you learn how to be happy again. Maybe you’re not happy all the time, and that’s okay – above all else, you’ve learned that you’re capable of being happy again, and that if you’re capable of being happy again then there must be more moments in the future where you are happy. You’re rejuvenated with something you’ve desperately needed this entire time but didn’t know until now: hope.

Everything will be OK.

And that’s empowering. It’s empowering to know. It’s motivation to continue. It’s a beautiful reminder, a ray of sunshine through the hurricane, that this, too, will pass. It’s a reminder that no matter how much pain you’re in, no matter how much pain you carry with you, that you were happy once, that you’re capable of happiness, that you’re deserving of happiness, and you will experience happiness again, once more, sometime, whatever that may mean to you, because there’s one constant in all of this: you. So hang on in there, because brighter days are coming.

Everything will be OK.

I promise.