Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.

I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.

That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.

My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.

I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.