Rediscover the feelings you used to believe it. Recondition yourself to believe that there is a special person out there who completes you. Rebelieve in love.

Morph, change, simplify, exemplify, extract, react, repaint, rebuild. And for god sake, don’t forget to cry if you need it. Becoming whole is a lifelong process, becoming healthy starts with everyday choices. Budge, remind, return, limit.

This isn’t just about grasping at a new start. This isn’t just about moving on. This is about moving forward. This is about transforming, evolving, the metamorphosis of something that has been ugly for so long. It’s about communicating with yourself. Getting to know and love and support who you are. It’s about taking things one day, one step, at a time. It’s about setting goals and it’s about hope.

“Hope.” Suddenly, it has meaning.

I DON’T KNOW WHY I COULDN’T SEE IT, couldn’t understand it, until now. It’s that dirty rag that’s been wrapped around my eyes. It’s the disgusting blindfold I’ve wrapped around me for so long that I can no longer bare to behold the sun. Why wasn’t it clear to me before?

Every Sunday, they preach the same thing. I thought I was absorbing everything. I have done this to myself. I have blinded myself. I have refused to allow someone who knows better than I to lead me. And when I look up in the middle of my world in honest disbelief and confusion, wondering how I got here; it is no mystery. I lead myself straight down my own road unto my own outcome.

So question me: How do you like it? How do you like the path you’ve cleared for yourself? Still think you can do better than a God who intimately loves and adores you? Still think you’re doing the best you can? Still think you’re being the best you can be?

The unhappiness creeps in and, at first, you don’t realize through which cracked window. Shut all of them. Shut everyone off. And alone with yourself, you realize it’s from within. How can you be the solution to your own mishaps?

There’s got to be something bigger. There’s got to be something better. There’s got to be something that fulfills me and makes me whole even in a world that is crumbling around me. If there isn’t, then what’s the point?

Here I am. Lead me away. Take me out.

Look at you.

You are just a little girl. You cry in front of your Mother because you can’t have what you want and you refuse to take your own steps towards growing up.

You are just a little girl throwing a tantrum. You scream agonizingly at your Mother, asking her to pick you up, but she only wants you to take your own first steps. She’s picked you up when you’ve fallen, over and over again, but you don’t remember. You only know that she is standing over you now.

You are just a little girl. You don’t understand through your tears that Mother is not displeased. She is not ashamed.  She is not embarrassed. She is not even indifferent. She is patient, she is watching. Her fingers ache to pick you up and hold you, but she dares not give into her heart, lest you become accustomed to a pain-free life.

You are just a little girl. How can you understand that what is unnatural to you now is how you were meant to live? How can you understand that you need to initiate your own first steps? How can you understand that you will fall again, and must again initiate another step forward. It’s ok if you cry, it’s ok to feel pain, it’s ok to wish you weren’t in such unhappy situations, but you must learn to carry on.

You are just a little girl. Your cheeks are wet and red with frustration, your eyes pressed shut in their own silent agony, squeezing tears from their depths. Your eyelashes are matted with salty water, your hair pressed against your damp, darling forehead. You can’t understand how much your Mother loves you. You don’t even comprehend how deep a Mother’s love can run.

You are just a little girl. You’ve never loved anything or anyone like your Mother loves you. You’ve never had to watch your own daughter cry up at you in her frustrated agony and know that she has to pick her own self up. You’ve never had to watch your own baby wrestle with herself over her own ability to carry on in life. How could you know? How could you do anything but cry and scream and give up? You don’t know what it’s like to run, you don’t know what it’s like to jump, you don’t know what it’s like to watch your own child begin to stand and carry themselves.

You are just a little girl. You don’t know the good things your Mother has in store. You don’t comprehend the love she shows in allowing you to learn from your mistakes, in allowing you to take your own steps, in allowing you to take them, even, in your own time, at your own pace. You can’t understand your Mother’s patience.

You are just a little girl.

A LADYBUG crawls on my page, wondering about the words I’m writing. I have heard ladybugs don’t live that long - it seems a waste to create something so finite. What’s the point of this creature? It has no soul, it hardly has a beating heart, it has no family, no feelings, no connection with it’s Creator (that any of us can tell). Why was it invented? Created? Put on this Earth?

Why was anything created when everything is so finite. Nothing lasts forever, except perhaps the bad things like pollution and disease.

They ladybug begins to stink, perhaps because he feels threatened. My world constantly threatens me but at least I have the decency to shower.

THE LEAVES AROUND ME, curled dead things that gave up the life inside them to hurl themselves off a tree-top, to smash themselves against an unforgiving ground only to be trampled under the unconcerned feet of strangers.

They curl and twist and splinter under the weight of compression. They scatter and scrape against the hot pavement, ringing hollow, scuttling, drifting.

They are dead. They don’t know where they’re being carried. They don’t care where they will end up. They are unconditional and cavalier.

The leaves are a bed of corpses piled up atop naked soil. There are no graves, there are no funerals.

They exist, but they do not live. They wait to be shattered, pulverized, they wait to be forgotten.

This last weekend, my brother and I made the one and a half hour drive out to Netarts, Oregon. Despite the awkward name, Netarts is an oasis in the rough. It’s a place where the Oregon forest converges with the ocean, where quaint little homes with salt eaten paint grip the rocky slopes that would slide them into the mouth of the sea. It’s just a dream world.

After cracking off the callouses of a city life and unwinding with family all night, my brother and I headed out for an early morning drive. As my BMW sumitted the hills above Oceanside, we burst upon the most spectacular rock giants jetting out of the sea in front of us. They stood resilient against the ocean air and some of their stone bases had worn through where a cave or two had taken up residence.

Noah and I pulled over to the side of the road for a smoke and just watched the bay while Whitley’s “More Than Life” played through my car’s speakers in the background of it all. It was the most blissful moment I can ever remember in my 22 years of life on this Earth.

While we sat in awe of it all, we watched a tall, skinny, wet-suit clad surfer climb up the side of the road with his board and walk towards his car. And my brother said to me, “I bet that blue 60s Volvo is his. I bet this guy is living the fucking life.” Sure enough, he dropped his board at the perfectly polished, perfectly blue ‘61 P1800 Volvo.

“I wanna do that.” Noah said. “I wanna drop everything and travel the world and surf.”

To my brother, this man was living the dream. He was single, unattached, surfing, traveling, and just plain free. He was, in that moment, everything my brother wanted to be, and he had everything my brother wanted to have. And I tended to agree.

As we watched this hero among men dry his things we noticed a second wet-suit clad figure scale the slopes towards him. We watched as the frail creature, the surfer’s seven year old daughter, emerged from the roadside.

It’s funny how your perception of life can change just like that. I suddenly realized that the happiest life would be surfing with my little girl and driving home in my blue, 60s Volvo. My happiest life would be one I could share with my family. Because no one really wants to fly solo for the rest of their life, and deep down, they know that. My happiest life would be one where I am loved and I give love back.

“There are a lot of happy people in this world,” says my grandfather.