It's Written In Their Eyes
(Partial Excerpt from the upcoming collective poetry book Shaking Off the Ashes)
The air was thick. Different from the thickness of humidity that blanketed my childhood memories from Florida. This air was thick with dust and smog with a dry heat that sat heavy on your skin. No breeze or air flow to speak of.
The van with its cracked vinyl seats and windows with roll up handles, broken off so they were perpetually rolled down, drove slowly down the bumpy unlevel dirt streets of Bo, Sierra Leone.
As we approached the two story, yellow school house, a guard pulled back the heavy metal gate to allow us into the yard. You could instantly hear the sounds of loud party-style music coming from a classroom upstairs echoing against the cinderblock walls and spilling out from the bars that covered the openings that served as windows. There was an energy here. A sense of joy that subconsciously permeated your soul without any effort.
We made our way up the stairs where the music was now mixed with sounds of laughter and frivolity. Turning the corner to enter we were met with loud cheers, applause and an onslaught of hugs. Hugs that felt no shame that they were moist with sweat from both the African sun and the previous hour of dancing.
Hugs…
As warm and intimate as any you would share with a loved one. And yet, we were strangers.
Over the next week, I would spend hours with these young women. Their stories some of the most heartbreaking of my life.
Turned away by their family because they preferred to have a son or due to a perfectly natural boy/girl relationship prior to marriage. Parents who died from war or poverty or disease leaving them penniless and homeless. Runaways from homes filled with parental abuse or domestic violence, often with children of their own.
In a country where women, even those with college educations, can scarcely find viable employment, these women had virtually no chance without help. So out of desperation they had become sex workers. Some as young as 14.
Earlier in the week, we visited a brothel to talk with more women and encourage them to consider joining the trade school program. To enter we navigated carefully alongside the two-foot-wide trench that served as a sewer, past the broken water pump and into the center of the complex of barely standing shacks. Each shack holding 3-4 closet-sized rooms with dirt floors and a shabby piece of cloth strung over the opening where a door should stand. You could hear sounds from these spaces indicating business, while children as young as toddlers wandered without supervision. No electricity or fresh water, scant provisions for sewer. When you look into the eyes of the women here, you saw the predictable hollow look of despair, hopelessness and fear. Despite multiple women occupying this complex they seemed isolated from one another.
In sharp contrast, inside that yellow school house, you find bright eyes glistened with hope and joy. But the hollow had been filled with something different, something bright, something full. They came from the same hard streets. They experienced the same abuse and societal discard.
Until they were saved, not by the American nonprofit who now funded their education in trade school. But by each other. By human connection that becomes a life raft in the vast, dark ocean of trauma. They had each other and life was a little brighter, a little lighter, a little better for it.
In western societies, particularly America, we think of resilience as an individualist activity.
“Pull yourself up by your boot straps.”
“Grow your grit”
“Persevere”
Thousands of books have been written on the topic of resilience, nearly all of them advising remedies that are solo endeavors ranging from self-care and meditation to endurance sports and extreme adventures.
There is value in any of those remedies. We certainly can not overcome adversity without tapping into our own selves, deeply examining the places we are wounded and knowing where the soul triage needs to take place. Pushing ourselves physically can build muscles of mental strength that serves us well in future hardship. Global travel and philanthropy can remind us the world is diverse and beautiful place, helping to minimize the looming impact of our own struggles. All of these develop our ability to adapt, to let go, to be flexible.
However, I believe this is only one element of the equation. My resilience equation…
Adaptability + Connection = Resilience
It is the connection piece that begins to stitch our brokenness back together. It is connection that holds us up when we are weak in the knees.
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The year 2023 held both the highest and lowest points of my life. The publication of my long-awaited first book followed directly by a layoff from both my job and my marriage within weeks of one another. The duality of this contrasting life reality left me flailing. Sleepless nights questioning everything. The film reel of my life to date playing on repeat while I meticulously scrutinized my behaviors, my words, my intentions. Blessed with friends and family who would help if they knew how, I attempted to cope in the way I had always coped…alone.
Then I boarded a plane bound for Italy, and unknowingly changed my life forever. There in the rolling hills of a vineyard, under the famous Tuscan sky, we found each other. Strangers who became intertwined like roots of an Aspen, unclear where one ends and another begins.
We came from across the US and abroad, each pulling a heavy wagon of boxes from our mind’s attic. Boxes of joy, boxes of pain, boxes of hope, boxes of despair. We piled them all in the middle of a room surrounded by yoga mats and journals and carefully sorted them into piles of what to honor and what to discard.
We held each other, literally and metaphorically, through the misery of pain and the triumph of uncomfortable growth. Day by day we laid bricks of trust that became a foundation, a lifeboat in the swell of life’s dark ocean. We sat naked, exposing our cracked imperfections and collectively poured gold to bond us into a single kintsugi bowl.
When the week concluded we stood in tears through hugs that lasted longer than the norm and yet never long enough. We scattered back across the world to our respective corners, somehow tethered together by an invisible thread. A thread that might go silent but can never truly be severed.
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Life upon my return did not suddenly become unicorns and rainbows. Since that collection of Tuscan moments, I have continued to grow and to grieve. Some people I trusted have departed, leaving a hole in my heart. Scared of work I was doing to change; I took solace in the knowledge that not everyone can go where you are going when you raise your own frequency. Some days the black hole of loneliness reached out to pull me in and it took all I could muster to avoid her depths. But I knew I could lie face down on the foundation of trust built in an Italian vineyard and sink no further down.
These days my phone pings a little less with invites to “see and be seen” events or adventures to fill Instagram, leaving more time for conversations of depth with those who really matter. I attend fewer nights out for dinner and drinks, leaving more time to learn new international recipes and sunrise trail runs. I strengthened my boundaries around work, leaving more time for leisure writing and thought. Most important, I made space to get reacquainted with me. The real me. The 46-year-old kintsugi bowl version of me. And you know what…I think she might be just be the real love of my life.
Travel taught me adaptability.
Love taught me connection.
Together these built Resilience.