It Will Be Enough

There have been many points where I wanted to post, but we didn’t have any cell service, so I pushed it off. Now there are two weeks’ worth of events, feelings, and experiences to sort through and I don’t know where to start. So, I ask myself, what is salient? What feels important? What will last?

In the past two weeks I have felt the entire range of human emotion—sometimes all in one day. I have been so lost and heartbroken that I could physically feel myself crumbling. I have felt happiness so bright it rivaled the sun beating down on my skin. I have felt empty and whole and oh so appreciative for every emotion, even the painful ones. These feelings are the things I will remember, even after I forget the day-to-day activities surrounding them.

I’ve spent nearly two hours writing and rewriting just to delete everything and start over. I started writing about everything I have done, only to come to the conclusion that this does not feel important to me right now. The things I’ve done are what will be shared when I get home and people ask how my trip was. So good! I kissed a giraffe! I went on safari and saw cheetahs chase down a wildebeest! These things are exciting, but they’re easy to share. They can be shared in shallow moments when I do not have the capacity to explain how difficult and complex the last few months of my life have been. I’ll share how I got so sunburnt my chin blistered and I loathed the malaria medication that cleared my skin of acne. I’ll talk about the days we spent driving through rainstorms and sliding through mud and getting stuck in ditches and how I convinced myself I was going to die. I’ll share the things that were hard but not too hard. It’s not that I want to filter my experience, it’s just that I’ve done it before, and I know it isn’t possible to share complexity in the moments people expect to hear about my time abroad. So, I’ll save those stories for when I run into people at coffee shops or at parties and I’ll share what’s appropriate in those short minutes. For now, I want to share what feels deep and real and true.

For much of this trip, I haven’t been around mirrors. I have been reliant on the camera on my phone (when it’s charged) and my friends to tell me how I look. Luckily, friends don’t often speak to us the way most of us speak to ourselves when looking in a mirror. I never took into consideration just how frequently I see myself when I am home in the U.S. There is so much time spent analyzing how I look. It has been refreshing to take a break. When I saw a mirror for the first time in weeks, it was very different. There was no analysis or critique, just a realization that this is how I look at the moment. And I felt so grateful for this body. So content with how I look. It made me so happy that I nearly cried.

There have been many moments like that in the past couple weeks. I nearly cried with joy when I saw two rainbows stretched across the expansive sky. I almost cried again when I saw two more at sunrise. Tears nearly came when I saw the stars from a village with no light pollution. They were so bright that I could capture them on my phone’s camera, and they covered more of the sky than I had ever seen. These moments told me I would be okay, that I didn’t need to figure anything out. If I just kept experiencing moments like that, things would be okay, and since these moments were always unexpected, I trusted they would keep coming. There has been a lot in the past couple weeks that made this message so necessary to hear; I am simply grateful that I was willing to hear it.

Along with these moments of almost crying have been many moments of actually crying. I took a day off to drink wine with my friend and cry and dance and watch the sunset from a water tower. People held space for me and held me in that space when I needed it. I feel so deeply a gratitude to people I hardly know. Even more so, I feel grateful to know that things will be okay, even when they feel like they won’t be. We can cry together and laugh together and most of the time, this is enough. That always, if we let it be, it will be enough. That is what feels salient and real in my life right now, more than anything else. And if it took me travelling halfway across the world to realize that, then hell, at least I got here.