The Unpopular Truth
"The unpopular truth is that healing is gradual. It usually looks like letting go of the same thing a hundred times." —Yung Pueblo
I have another little sister now. She doesn’t share my blood, but she shares damn near everything else.
I see myself in her—the same determination, grit, joy—and most of all, I see myself in her struggles.
Just like with my biological little sister, I feel protective over her challenges, caught somewhere between pride and heartache that she has to face life’s ills so soon. But more beautifully, I connect to her through them.
Especially in the way her storms brew—intensely, one force crashing into the next, compounding and growing until it’s almost too much to bear.
Over hummus and kombucha, she poured out her heart, recounting the ways life had pushed her to the brink over the past year and a half. We had to pause at each detail, not just to process but to react—to sit in the weight of it, to recognize how eerily parallel our timelines have been.
Just like the parallel photo we once took.
The one we thought marked the first day of our friendship in Barcelona, only to later realize we had unknowingly captured the exact same moment, in the exact same positioning, when we were seven years old in New York. We weren’t strangers after all.
We were childhood friends.
…
As she spoke about her darkness, I marveled at the fact that all this time, she had been nothing but a light to me since I arrived here.
When I was in my own darkest storm, people first started calling me a light.
I didn’t understand its brilliance until I watched her beautiful eyes glass over—not to weep, but to shine.
I felt a heaviness sink in, and that’s when she admitted—this is her first storm.
She’s never been to the other side.
I told her I was excited for her.
She gave me a weird look. I laughed. I expected that.
I told her: I honor your pain, and I am here for all of it, in any capacity. But I feel no fear for you. No doubt. Because I can already feel how incredible your life is going to be. It pulses through every beat of the pain, through every moment you’ve chosen to smile despite it.
Through hindsight, I told her:
One day, you will be dumbfounded at how beautiful life becomes when pain transforms into gifts you never even dared to dream of.
Gifts that, for the first time, you will feel like you deserve.
But I remember—all too well—how terrifying life feels when you don’t have hindsight.
When you can’t yet piece together the micromoments, the seemingly random encounters, the tiny threads of meaning weaving themselves into the eventual peace, presence, and people granted to you at the end of the tunnel.
…
So I remembered something I once heard at a service here in Barcelona.
The pastor said:
"In troubling times, or in those of high stress, make a box. A box of mini miracles. Collect receipts, messages, pictures—anything that reminds you that you are guided and protected, even on the hardest days. Watch that box multiply. Watch how, the more you add to it, the more light finds its way in."
So that’s what I had the privilege of doing for my new little sister.
Through my beautiful pain, through the gift of hindsight, I helped her open herself back up—to the idea that the world is good. That goodness is everpresent, even when we can’t see it.
I walked away to use the restroom, and when I came back, she was finishing a conversation.
Not with me.
With a stranger.
Someone who had overheard our talk, someone who looked at her and said:
"Everything is going to be just fine. I am 75 years old, and I promise you—one day, you won’t even remember this feeling."
…
So here we are. The reason for this blog.
I’ve been wrestling with this idea:
The gift of forgetting or the power of remembering?
Must we remember what we suppress in order to heal?
Or is it in the letting go—in leaving the past where it belongs—that we free ourselves?
Does forgetting allow us to renew each day, to live undefined and unlimited?
Or is it through remembering that we connect the dots to find our way?