Embraced in Magic dances with the shadow “Abandoned” and celebrates the commitment to kindness in the face of cruelty and honors that positive transformation of the world around you starts with an empowered change within.
Dear Abandoned,
At first, at the very beginning, you thought it was unjust, a cruel joke, and maybe, even, a mistake. Then, day after day, with each little cruelty, the facts lined up into a reality. This was the status quo. This was reality. Perhaps for other children, life was different, filled with unwavering love and ready support. Those children deserved all of that goodness. That was the just and reasonable way of the world.
And so the thought grew until it was the standard by which you measured all of your reality: you were abandoned because that was what you deserved. There was some defect, something wrong in your actions or your essence, something that caused the people who should, by all accounts, love a child unconditionally to disdain you instead. How else could you find autonomy in that situation than to seize the power, any power you could, even if it was the power of being unworthy of love. You seized the narrative and used it to survive and push forward.
Even though it was a flawed narrative all along, even though you punished yourself and blamed yourself with every step forward, flagellating yourself for each imperfection, even as you accepted that you could never be good enough for anything other than a new abandonment, even though you suspected the flaws existed outside yourself, you used that energy to survive the untenable and to escape.
Even though.
In time, you distilled your experience and your story into better lessons. You learned empathy by learning to suffer and survive. You embraced kindness by watching the cutting power of cruelty. You gained resilience by witnessing self destruction. You defined love by trusting the friends who never abandoned you even when you begged them to do so. You discovered magic by accepting the family who made a sanctuary in the chaos when they could.
Now, despite the past, despite that old insidious inner voice recounting the cruel lessons of the flawed narrative, you choose every day to share the new lessons through your actions, your art, and your words. You have committed to kindness as your guide because you know the spiteful alternative.
I am proud of you.
–Jocelynne Simone