Wishes

Sent by Lauren Jane Heller    |   March 23, 2020

Do wishes come true?

I think they do. Not the kind of wishes that involve new bicycles or ponies, perhaps, but the ones that matter, that we dwell on, that we urge into being. 

I spent much of my childhood in my imagination. I wished that things could be different: that I would be seen for who I really am, that I would have friends who understand me, that I would be recognized for my talents. I wished to live a life of creativity and self-expression, unafraid of what other people thought, accepted for my strangeness, my love of things that were different from what I saw around me. I wished to be happy and successful and wealthy and to help other people. I wished to be the things that my heart told me were true. 

It took decades for me to recognize that I was wishing for things I already had. What I longed for was already inside me but I was stuck on being affirmed by others. I was waiting for someone else to give me permission to be me. 

The tricky part about affirmation is that there’s never enough. If you’re looking for it at all, you’re going to encounter opinions you don’t like, criticism that cuts deep. Other people’s baggage — their fears and failures, their ideas about how something is supposed to be — will derail you, make you question yourself. It is a precarious existence. I lived in constant fear of other people catching me out, tripping me up. Because I didn’t have the self-belief, I was unable to trust that being me was okay.

It all came crashing down before I learned to let go. I learned that the big emotions — the anxiety and fear and self-doubt — were teaching me things about myself that were important if I could just watch them come and go. I learned that joy, contentment, acceptance can coexist with the big tough feelings. It’s not either or. Feelings aren’t bad or good, they just are. 

We all experience fear and anxiety and loss. We live through trauma and darkness. But there is always joy and light on the other side if only we can find the strength to be patient, to seek them out in unlikely places.

How we make sense of the chaos, of uncertainty, has so much to do with where we are on our own journeys. If we’ve found that our wishes do come true because we believe in them and ourselves, then the sharp changes, the great cataclysms can feel somehow less jarring. They sadden us, of course, but they also remind us of the importance of finding meaning inside ourselves because out there everything is and will always remain tenuous and fragile and uncertain.

There are good days and bad days. There are moments when it all feels like a dream and others when certainty reigns supreme — the knowledge that whatever happens, it’s going to be okay. We will persist in the face of the unknown. People have a habit of keeping on keeping on. 

Yesterday, as I stood soaking in the sunshine in the chilly garden, April asked me what I would want if I could wish for anything. It’s her birthday tomorrow, so these things have been on her mind. 

I didn’t know what to say.

She said she’d wish for the coronavirus pandemic to go away.

As she said it, I thought, well, that is the obvious wish to make right now, isn’t it? I suppose some wishes are more practical than others. I do believe her birthday wish will come true. Maybe not tomorrow, but it will at some point. The timescale is the challenge. Things just don’t happen as quickly as we’d like. That said, I’m sure we’ll look back in a few years and be amazed at how long ago it feels — that time when we started distancing ourselves physically in order to take better care of each other. 

I wish you all a good week of finding the beauty and joy where you can. I know this is starting to wear most of us this but I'm trying to see kindness as the antidote. I hope you'll find it helps you too.