Reflections

Nearly five months after returning from New York, I finally feel ready to write a reflection. Immediately after I flew home, I couldn't completely understand what that summer in the City meant to me. I knew it was important--in ever sense of the word--but I didn't know how it would change me; how it would shape my goals and my sense of self.

The time I spent in New York was not easy. I was lonely, and lost, and trying to re-define myself, and striving for meaning in a city of strangers. But the truth is that I was lost before I landed in the City on my first evening. I was broken from a trying year of love and loss and regret and hard lessons. And New York didn't cure me (as I had hoped it would). Instead, sometimes, it shone a spotlight on my insecurities--on my fears. I felt alone constantly, but yet, I couldn't separate myself from the pain I'd supposedly left behind.

I suppose that's a big part of what I learned--that pain is pain no matter where you are or how far you go to escape it. But more importantly, I learned that the presence of pain does not mean an absence of strength. And that strength does not require an absence of doubt or uncertainty or indifference to adversity. Sure, sometimes strength means bearing down and pushing through the pain. But I think that sometimes strength means crying until you can't anymore, or praying for a sign that things will be okay again, or writing your thoughts down until you can't even stand yourself. Sometimes strength means living the process--the taking of small steps. I think strength is having faith in the good even when it is difficult to see. That is really what I learned from my summer in New York: that no matter what my life brings, I have faith in my ability to take the steps, however small, and that they will carry me to new heights.




This experience was the best gift I could have received. Not because it made me whole again, or because it filled any voids I may have had--but because it not only taught me to live with the holes and scars of a well-lived life--it taught me to treasure them.