Beautiful

Remember your beauty.
Remember your worth.
Remember that you mean something.
That the world is a brighter place with you in it.

If you feel that you are broken, know that I am broken too. If we were all honest with ourselves and with each other, we'd realize that we are all broken in some way. All the pretty masks we wear won't hide it. Perhaps it's time we stop hiding it.

I know the weight you carry is lonely and painful and devastating at times, and the darkness feels as if it might swallow you whole if you just stopped for a second to let yourself truly feel. But there is beauty in your fight. There's a fierceness in your will to survive. There is brilliant, blinding light on the other side of midnight, just waiting to break through, waiting to save you.

So if you are so buried in the pain that you can't see a safe way through it, if you feel like you're not good enough, not worthy enough, not strong enough -- let these words ring out like an anthem in your soul:

You are beautiful.
You are beautiful.
You are beautiful.

You are too beautiful to lose. 

Fight

The fact of the matter is that life is just hard sometimes.
And it's easy to lose ourselves in the hardness of it.
In all the false starts and futile attempts.
In all the dreams still dreams.
But without dreams and hopes and inspiration, what is there left to strive for?

I get why it's easier -- safer perhaps -- to just accept defeat than to crash in continual disappointment.
But that's the tricky thing about life.
You just never know when something could change for the better.
When wounds could heal.
When you might catch a break.
Or achieve the most impossible dream.

So fight against the mundanity. Every day.
Fight against the hard to reconcile reality glaring in stark contrast against the entire universe you've dreamed up for yourself.
Fight against depression. Against anxiety. Against any and all voices that would seek to silence you, or to sentence you to a fate that was never ever intended to be yours.
Fight to hold on.
Just a little bit longer.
Knowing that, believing that, there is beauty to be found in all of it.

Birthday Revelations

None of our lives are perfect. None of us have arrived. What we don't often see in the day to day of cliché conversations and social media shares are the things we miss. The people we miss. The hard days. The broken days. The days where we wonder if any of this life stuff is worth it. The days where our dreams seem infinitely impossible.

But we hold onto the moments. The seconds. The brief breaths that sustain us until the next -- the next second of inspiration, of connection, of hope. We hold on, and we remind ourselves that beauty is often found in the seemingly insignificant snapshots of our lives. In the grit, and the grain, and the grace of it all.

In That Moment

When my heart feels sad for a hundred different reasons, there’s always the sea – soothing me with its waves. Mountains – inspiring me with their strength. Desert – reminding me that even in the dust and barrenness, beauty exists. And if nature weren’t enough, then comes music. Notes and words and feelings all juxtaposed together somehow making sense of the sadness, the madness, the brilliant, brilliant mess. And in that moment of utterly losing myself to the wind and the earth and the songs – the stories reminding me of ones greater than my own – I find a little bit of myself I thought I’d lost. In that moment, I am free.

Perspective

As I looked at a sunset panorama I captured tonight with my phone, I began to analyze how some of the lines were crooked --- how I didn’t hold the phone steady enough, how imperfect it was. But I’m reminded now that often times the world is full of beauty – astounding beauty; and yet, we can’t see it because our perspective is skewed. We focus on what is flawed, what we’re doing wrong, what we could be doing better. But in that tendency to overanalyze, to think purely with a critic’s mind, we miss it.

Life. Beauty. Stillness. Love.

Perfection is pointless. Love cannot exist without first knowing pain. Beauty and peace and hope cannot thrive without us first feeling broken and lost and despondent. So I’d rather capture something in all its imperfections – in all its raw authenticity. Because that is the definition of beauty – in nature, in life, and in ourselves. Nothing else compares. Nothing else is worth our time.