Anonymous
Photography by Isabella Kunze
If you’re reading this, remember the ink is wet, and the wind is picking up.
I have spent many years trying to understand the architecture of my mind, forgetting that to live is not to be a painting hanging on a wall, but a kaleidoscope with every shift and every story being a deliberate turn of that lens.
The struggle for acceptance persisted through my teenage years. I believed that stillness was stability and that if I held my breath for long enough, the world would stop rearranging itself in obscure ways. However, accepting the discomfort of ever changing circumstances was the beginning of it all.
Acceptance isn’t a result, but a choice: the choice of letting go of that version of ourselves built upon fear and failed expectations, as well as those moments which can no longer move forward with us. I believed that if I chained myself to my past, it would protect me from losing myself, but the truth was that the tighter I held on, the more I drifted away from who I was meant to become.
It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t meant to live in a story that had already been told or in the memories of my past lovers, friends, or my past self. I am not ink, and life isn’t an inkwell I’m meant to fit into. I wasn’t meant to take the shape of someone else’s expectations or to shrink just to fit in a container that was too small but instead to live in the lines that I have yet to trace, to spill, and to become. We are not always meant to be the ones that carry the answers but to be the questions themselves.
Now, as a young adult in college, I have grown to realize that if I focus on the ink that’s already dried, I might miss the way the wind picks up.
“Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.” — C.G. Jung
Anonymous, Florida State University
Connect With Us
To follow IfYoureReadingThis at FSU on Instagram, get in touch with our chapter, and learn about more resources available to FSU students, visit our chapter’s homepage.
AUTHOR CONTACT
This author has opted to allow readers who resonate with their story to contact them. If you would like to speak to the author of this letter about their experience, please use the form below.
