Upon the 34th Anniversary of My Arrival Twelve thousand, forty-five days perfecting the art of w a l k i n g on e g g s h e l l s around someone who disowned me three times through text and email. Three hundred ninety-six months placating a woman who would abandon her child with near-strangers in a place seventeen hundred miles away from normalcy. Three decades living on edge, startled by loud noises and careful to make myself small and contained. But this year I wanted something different: Permission to empty my world of the people and things reluctantly hoarded out of guilt or shame. To make space to breathe, to find my voice, to find myself buried long ago in the crushed dreams and abandoned pursuits of a love-starved little girl. To find what sets my soul aflame… To know what my laughter sounds like… For my thirty-fourth birthday I laid my past to rest, and launched a mission to rescue myself.
We become saints slowly, and often in the most ordinary of ways.