Everything Grows Towards The Light.

Today I was talking to someone very
dear to my heart about making “bad” choices. I use “bad” loosely because I
don’t like the word, I feel that it encourages shame. But for the sake of this
post, I am going to use it. After I hung up the phone, I found myself making a
mental list of all the bad choices I’ve made in my almost 23 years on planet earth.
I was just getting to the bad choices of my 18^th year when I caught
a glimpse of myself in the mirror on my wall. This mirror is a really cheap
plastic framed one that the last tenants left in my room, one I really only
ever use it to make sure that my shoes go with the rest of my outfit. So you
could say that up until today it was the least important of all of my mirrors.
But today as I looked into the eyes staring back at me, all I saw was a blonde
haired, hazel-eyed young woman wearing old running shorts and a t-shirt that
badly needed to be made into a rag. I didn’t see any of my past choices or the
people that may have judged me too harshly or even the hammer that I keep in my
own head to come down on myself in guilt and shame. All I saw was the same
face, eyes, and knobby elbows and knees that have been there all along.  And It dawned on me, not only am I the
me I have always been regardless of the places I’ve passed along the way, but I
think that I am a better version of that self because of what I’ve been
through.