still i rise
Life is full of defining moments. It’s crazy how you can go along living your life in autopilot for years and then all of a sudden a family member dies, your parents separate, you go through a breakup, you lose your job, etc. Things were going pretty smoothly up until I turned 22. 22 was supposed to be the year of all years! It was the year of my golden birthday (aka the year when you turn the same age as your birth date), I was graduating from college, starting a new job & moving back to Boston to be closer to family and friends. A few months after I turned 22, however, life as I knew it was flipped upside down.
“Mom and dad need to talk to you when you get home.” These were the words my sister said when she called me while I was away at training in San Francisco for my new job in August of 2016. All I could think was that someone had died or someone was sick. Never once did it cross my mind that my parents would be telling me they were separating never mind getting a divorce. When I got home, this was the reality I had to face. The pain and hurt I felt from the situation was at times debilitating. I didn’t want to go to work. I didn’t want to face my family or friends. I struggled to cope with the situation because it had completely caught me off guard.
When I finally started to open up about the situation, I realized that so many other people had been through similar experiences. Part of growing up is realizing that things aren’t always as they seem and that people sometimes try to “shield you from the truth” because they don’t think you can handle it. This would not be the end of the world. Both of my parents were still alive. I had a roof over my head. I had a job. I had food on the table. Things could have definitely been much worse. I decided that I didn’t need to let this life event define me and that the best path forward was forgiveness. Why forgive? Because when you fail to forgive, you walk around with a burden. Negative energy. Hateful thinking. It starts to get in the way of your daily life and the way you interact with others. So I decided to move forward.
Looking back, I think that I’m a lot stronger because of this experience. Around this time last year, I got a tattoo of the words “still I rise” as a reminder that you can’t control other people’s actions, but you can control how you choose to move forward. I found the words “still I rise” in one of my favorite Maya Angelou poems:
“Just like moons and like suns, with the certainty of tides. Just like hopes springing high, still I’ll rise.”
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There will always be bumps in the road, but know that you always have a choice about how you want to react and no one can take that away from you.