Strangers

This morning I passed you on the street, as I have many mornings, walking through the darkness that consumes us just before the dawn. I lifted my face to the bitter cold of the early morning winds. I smiled at you. I watched you intently to see if you'd look up, if today would finally be the day you acknowledged me as I passed. You didn't. You continued to look at the ground. You averted your eyes from me.

And I thought, how funny to live in a world where people are afraid to say hello. How funny that you should be afraid of me, simply because we haven't met, simply because we are strangers. How funny that we should spend our lives fearing the unknown.

Surely it is a miracle that my faith in people, my trust in their goodness, has never gotten me into any serious trouble. I don't have what one of my friends dubbed "good girl intuition," where you know you shouldn't be somewhere, where being there makes you feel unsafe. I have no problem walking through the darkness on almost entirely abandoned streets to get to work each morning. I have no problem walking through neighborhoods that some of my friends wouldn't even risk driving through. I have no problem being somewhere in the middle of the Himalayas at 2am, barefoot, with people I'd only met a few hours before. I feel safe in the world. I feel safe with strangers.

Where I don't feel safe is inside my own skin, a thought that only occurred to me for the first time this morning. Why is it I can trust a stranger not to hurt me, but I can't trust anyone enough to love me? Why is it I can have faith in everyone but myself? Why is it I can see goodness in everything and everyone except for the woman looking back at me in the mirror?

I've had friends ask me these same questions before, but I suppose it's one of those things that never really resonates until I come to question it myself, until I'm ready to face the truth. The truth is, I have never once believed in myself. I have never once had enough faith in myself to reach for the things I want, to lay my heart on the line, to be the kind of person people seem to see me as. I have never once seen what they see.

It's a difficult task, to step outside oneself, to understand the full scope of who you are, how you fit into the world. It is an art I have not mastered, although I try desperately to gain such a perspective. It has been, and continues to be, the greatest struggle of my life. I work hard to accept myself for who I am. It takes all of the strength within me to just breathe, to know that I am doing my best, to understand that sometimes that's enough. It takes every stretch of my imagination to believe that what people are telling me about myself is true. It takes everything I have to be even slightly comfortable inside my own skin.

I have agonized over why I am like this, assuming that by finding the root of the problem, I would be able to fix it, assuming that confidence was as simple as patching up a wound from the past. But it is not that easy. There is no moment I can point to and say there. There is no person I can point a blameful finger at. There is nothing that can save me but my own determination.

And so I resolved this morning to begin that arduous journey towards self acceptance. I resolved to breathe, to give myself credit where it's due, to stop carrying around guilt and shame as though they were important things to hold on to. I resolved to unload the heavy burden of their meaning and make room for confidence and joy. I resolved to be the person who saves my life.

And years from now, if I were to pass this current version of me, that former version of me, I would not want to avert my eyes. I'd like to look up. I'd like to see goodness. I'd like to smile and say hello.