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#011 — In Conversation with Her
Someone asked me recently what had changed about me since my late twenties and early thirties. The question stayed the way people stay after dinner until the restaurant closes.
In the weeks since, I have been in conversation with that version of me and the world that surrounded her then and now. How much has changed and how much has not. Sudan. Rwanda. Congo. Years I had not revisited in this way.
What I noticed first was her light. The optimism. The way she moved through difficult places without assuming difficulty was the whole story. She talked to strangers easily. Laughed easily. Boarded planes as though movement itself might reveal another layer of the world. She understood something about being human that I am only now returning to with greater clarity.
The story we are often told is that exposure to harm makes a person harder. That awareness narrows. That aliveness is the price of seeing clearly.
That is true.
And something else is also true.
Years later, I have come to understand something else about her and perhaps about the world itself. What she carried was a way of holding dignity and hope without waiting for the world to authorize either one.
Dignity, I am learning, may be far more irreducible than we understand. Environments can fragment people, narrow them, distance them from themselves. Some environments nurture human wholeness. Others sever people from it. But obstruction is not absence. Something may still remain underneath. The work of becoming, perhaps, is learning to recognize what was already there and building the conditions where it can endure.
One thing worth carrying: What part of you still wants to be seen?
— Judithe
Notes written while a book is becoming.
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