In the halls of the classroom a professor addressed the gathering
“Color is the most important thing to see in your students.”
Yet within my heart an opposing perspective unfurled,
For I firmly believe in perceiving beyond whats seen.
“Not race but merit ” I softly whispered in response
As talents and dreams should soar limitlessly.
Each student, a canvas painted with hues
Their potential unrestricted by a lens.
A palette of minds an untamed spectrum lies, before us,
Where brilliance and creativity remain unnamed.
Within each shade resides a captivating narrative
Not confined to predetermined colors we are told to see.
To judge based on race to measure through skin
Dims the radiance that each individual possesses.
A brushstroke of bias, a shade of ignorance cast upon us all
Suppresses the essence of significance and beauty.
Let us embrace the kaleidoscope of souls that surround us
Where differences unite than divide.
For, within the inclusive frame of our classrooms
Genuine learning and personal growth carve their purpose.
So let us not impose limitations or draw lines to define others
Instead let understanding radiate brightly.In the hearts and minds of people diversity flourishes, like an unsung but harmonious song.
I so love this piece, so love it. No one should ever be judge by their skin tone, something you had no control over. Not sure why everyone wasn’t born with the same skin tone, there had to be a reason, a reason we will never know, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t for us to hate each other for it. Me personally, I’m not sure if all was born with the…read more
I would agree with you!
You know I wrote this off a true story. The words this person said were true. I had to take a whole class talking about this topic. The class was centered around race and how important noticing race was.
I want to see my students cultures and their traditions personally.
As I look back into my past actions, I realize that there were things that I should have changed. It’s interesting how so many authors, politicians, philosophers have written about ‘the past’ in relation to our present selves, but we continue to belabor the point. McCarthy states in All the Pretty Horses, that “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” Without this reminder, we won’t learn the lessons that the past has taught us, but rather repeat them mindlessly as if we don’t know any better. As I recall my worst mistake, I realize today, that it could have been circumvented by simply communicating clearly. However, if you’re like me, and the problem is within the family, you omit speaking in order to be respectful and not hurt the feelings of those you love.
I’ve also learned, that when you speak your mind and express yourself concisely, you get the result you need: understanding. Without talking, how can others know how you’re feeling, or even how you’re affected by a particular event? Added to that, by discussing the problem, calmly, you get to see the different perspectives that each individual is coming from, rather than assuming you already know. I’ve learned that assuming someone’s motives for an action may be wrong, and that is what leads to greater misunderstandings and conflict.
I think that Katherine Anne Porter says it best, as she expresses it best in saying: “The past is never where you think you left it.” By that she means that with the information, maturity you had at the time, you can grasp a part of the events that occurred. However, in retrospect, having changed, become wiser through various experiences, makes your perspective of the event change with time. Here I don’t mean the actions that took place, but rather the reactions and assumptions that you had made.
I’ll sum up with my poetic version of this:
Communication is a tool
You use to oppress the pool
Of depression, that spawns from regret
Over actions taken in past event.
Couch your speech,
Make it into a delicate flower to preach
Behaviors that promote, compassion,
Understanding, love, and devotion.
Communication is very very important in all aspects. Especially when it comes to self respect. To communicate your feelings is the first step to having a respectful relationship with yourself. Thank you for sharing
Thank you for taking the time to sit with yourself and process your thoughts and feelings. This year, you really took yourself & your ideas seriously. Your perseverance through rejection is admirable and I appreciate you, even when others don’t.
When you lost your job in January- you didn’t beat yourself up.
When the bank funds were low- you leaned on your family for support while pushing through to find a new job.
When you felt broke, busted, and disgusted- you sought wisdom in books, the Bible, and your family.
You manifested cool opportunities & got creative with the tools at your disposal.
To me, you may not be exactly where you want to be, however, you’ve come farther than you expected. You could’ve chosen to listen to well- meaning advice, but you listened to your gut & for that I respect you!
Thank you for being you- which is the hardest thing to do.
I love this letter! You should be so proud of your strength and perseverance. I hope you always remember that whatever challenges you face in life, you have the power to handle it with strength, grace and power.
Thank you so much Lauren! Your feedback is so valuable to me. Thank you for creating this platform and safe space. I look forward to the many more stories/letters/entries I create!!!
I so look forward to them as well. I hope you have a. wonderful thanksgiving if I don’t see this week online. Thank you for being. a part of our family.
Hi. Great letter Victoria. Perseverance in tough times is a trait that not everyone has. Clearly you do. You should be very proud. I hope you have a great thanksgiving 🙂
Hi Jim. Thank you so much! I appreciate your words- I certainly needed to hear them. Persevering still by staying optimistic about the future although I don’t know what’s next. Happy Thanksgiving to you too. 😁🙏🏾
You’re very welcome Victoria. Glad I could help a little bit. An yes the unknown. It’s certainly one of my biggest obstacles. I’m sure for many. But persevering seems like the only choice right?
Thank you. Hope yours is a nice one 🙂
Dear Unsealer,
I am so glad you listened to the voice inside you and followed your heart.Keep going forward and you will have much success in all you do.
Thank you so much Ms. Shelley for your kind words. I truly needed them today. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust ourselves in the face of uncertainty…we have to keep pushing through!
Blessings!! 🙂
Don’t get me wrong, your life is amazing now, and better than you could have imagined, but it is nowhere near the plan you had envisioned. To be fair, your ten-year plan was flawless; Everything so perfectly articulated and not a measure out of place. It truly was a sight to behold. A girl with her head on so straight that the odds couldn’t beat her. She’s a shoe-in for everything she could want out of life. Then, came the kicker.
You didn’t get into your top school. You chose a major you didn’t even think of before. You moved farther away from home than you could have anticipated. And that’s okay.
You had such high goals and ambitions for yourself. You set your sights so high that along the way, it seems you lost yourself amongst the clouds. You roamed around the libraries in your head for too long, I’m afraid. You, my dear, filled your mind with every fact, tidbit, and file of information that nothing else had room to grow in such a vast, but crowded garden. You replaced your insecurities with flashcards, your worries with study guides, and your doubts with extracurriculars after school because being a robot could get you into a good school, but being real and being human could not. You misconstrued friendships for tutoring sessions and took your leadership as a means for control, not guidance. You traded the chance to be a kid for the hopes of being a successful adult.
And then this little thing called a pandemic happened. It was almost as if the world…stopped. Nothing in time mattered more than being present because being present meant that you were with the people you loved. You garnered the ability to love and be loved. You were in the present and realized that time is a present, a gift meant to be opened once and used wisely.
Something changed for you. You learned to let in your emotions and experience life. Many doors closed, but so many gates opened. What you never thought could be attained came flooding to you in an instant.
So, from me to you, I want to say that we’re doing just fine. You prepared me for the ‘what-if’s’ and infinite and endless possibilities that could have arisen. So now, I can prepare for our future. The future where we pursue our goals, but we also make friends along the way. The future where we love and let go. The future where you grow, and I grow with you. I, in your place, will prepare us for the portion of life where we live, and live boundlessly and blissfully. The portion of life where you, my dear, live, and live a thousand lives after because to be alive and live your life is the best present of them all. I’ll do my best to make you the happiest you’ve been and the proudest you’ll be because whether you believed it or not, you deserved to live too.
This is so well-written and so well said. I am someone who also gets caught up in plans and goals and sometimes forgets to enjoy the moment. I am glad the pandemic gave you a perspective that allowed you to enjoy life and the people you love. Someone once told me 2020 led her to 2020 vision. Sounds like something similar happened to you. Thank…read more
Life never goes the way we want it to go. It’s like a roller coaster where every time we go up in the world we tend to fall. Sometimes the Destiny we seek the destinies of our own accord but God tends to have something else planned for us. Just like you I’ve attended college for something I wanted at the beginning but found a different cal…read more
Salutations,
Your letter has a powerful message and lesson written in it. I find it disappointing when plans don’t come to fruition but, I find myself enjoying living in the moment and it makes me realize that my plans probably wouldn’t have been half as fun as living presently. We forget that, especially overachievers and planners. I suppose,…read more
WOW, I love how well-written your letter is. Thank you so much for shedding light on a lesson I’m currently learning. Remaining in the present while planning on what changes will lead to my success is something I am practicing. I’m learning that without balance I take on a lot at once without giving myself the grace to take care of myself. It’s…read more
I resonate with this. I have 3 children and often times I’m so focused on keeping the at bay that I can’t seem to savor the moment. Thank you for sharing.
Those words might sound weird or not make sense to you now, but if you start to refer to yourself as love, your true love, you will experience the magic inside of you, unfolding and taking you to all of the places you could ever want to go. You are the living love story of you.
Your fear of surviving is merely an illusion, my love. I don’t mean to be blunt, as you sometimes tend to take things very personally, I simply mean to convey that when the lingering thoughts of quitting college commence, flow with them. As you begin thinking and feeling about how farming in Ireland is more appealing than your writing classes and literature studies, listen. You’ve only known the linear path that most are expected to live, but the world, and your human experience can be much more grand than that. Deep down, you know this already, but the attempted ingrained notion that has been passed down to you, is not yours. It’s the illusion given to you from your father, my love, and it does not belong to you.
You tend to hide the essence of who you are from your mother, so that you can convince yourself she accepts you. My love, this too, has nothing to do with you. While you believe that you must prove you are worthy of respect and admiration, learn to discern, to understand, grapple with the perfection you already are. Your core ideologies are rooted in love. You don’t realize it, but you yearn to be a fierce woman. I validate you from the future; it is safe to allow yourself to be all that you are. Lose the people pleasing pattern of behavior, and you will be pleased with yourself.
Everything you desire, desires you too. Go to Ireland, have lovers, get tattoos, go to Chicago and attempt a career in stand up comedy-go down the roads that call to you. You will know yourself in a different way than I have come to know us, but we will end up in the same place because the message we were born to share has never changed. I feel no shame in my choices, but I followed the linear path, the path led by outside forces to “success”. Chase what brings you joy from the beginning, that’s having it figured out, that’s why we’re here. Inevitably, you will experience loss, pain, disappointment, failure, but it feels so much better if it’s something your heart told you to do instead of your mind. I took an education course and hated it, but I knew I was here to teach. I taught in a public school during a pandemic and it took that experience to tell me, I can teach somewhere else, in a different place, in a way that suits me, us.
You are a writer, you know this; this knowledge makes up the plasma, cells, and platelets in your blood. No professor, no parent, no person can tell you who or what you are. You decide what you are for yourself and since before you could even write, it was instinctual that you were born to tell stories. Go live the stories you dream of and go tell the people what you’ve learned. I’m doing it now, and perhaps maybe these are the stories I’m meant to be telling and teaching, but love, the thought of looking back and seeing smiles instead of anxieties brings peace to the soul. The world will wait for you,
P.S. Just go ahead and get shaving your head over with instead of doing it when you’re 29.
Madi this is so well written. I love the idea of a love story with yourself. And I am with you – I don’t want to live a linear life. There is so much pressure to do so, but it is not for everyone. You are like me – you need a little adventure. – Take the trip, kiss the boy (or girl), live the life YOU want and have fun along the way! Loved your…read more
Wow it’s all I can say from reading this story. Self love is such an important thing to have. What makes this a great letter is that you found your own path to self love your one true love is someone you can always count hard and not many people can count on others but you know what’s in your mind and in your heart so you can trust yourself. Ama…read more
Salutations,
I admire your courage and commend you for sharing. I hope the audiences you reach can grasp everything you convey within this letter to yourself and I hope you celebrate how far you’ve come. I think everyone can agree that being gentle and loving with yourself is of the utmost importance. For who will love us when the world doesn’t?…read more
Aww thank you! Thank you for using the word “gentle” to describe the tone, I love that. I feel like I am learning new ways to be gentle with myself, a journey I will never regret. I look forward to sharing more 🙂
Madi I love how well written your letter is! You knock out some major life lessons right away and I love how you write it. Romanticizing how to love yourself and discovering what’s at your core is the quickest way to loving yourself in my opinion. Then how you know into breaking down the fears that are illusions created through behaviors and i…read more
Thank you 🙂 I am so glad you felt all of the things I wanted to express! I hope to share these kinds of messages with the youth, because truly, imagine how different life would be! <3
I use to be an adventurer. When I was younger I would go into the woods and imagine I was in a fantasy land. Now I’m older and I’m rediscovering that side of me with my husband by my side. Society tries its best to cripple that part of us.
What wonderful work! Congratulations on achieving it. Let’s be friends! Our experiences differ but the feeling of being alone, of not connecting with others… it is the same. Isolation, the sense of being the only one experiencing it is so common to us and to others here. So rare to speak o it, to put it out in the open, o take the risk.
Amber what a sweet poem to your younger self. I want to give you and your younger self a hug. You now our part of The Unsealed family, and you are loved. You beautiful and your are strong. So proud of your strength. It takes courage to face your past but not allow to be your present. You have so much to love and so much to be proud of. <3 Lauren
Amber this poem is magnificent. Younger you would be so proud of the person you are today. Your letter is so inspiring because a lot of us go through dark paths in the past where it is very hard to find the light to get out of that darkness. I’m glad that she found your light and that you motivating other people to find their light.
Amber this is such a thought-invoking poem! I love the depth of it and how you really paint a picture of your feelings with your words. I think a hard lesson we all experience (on different levels is) that people are supposed to come and go in our life. Some longer than others and some in the worst ways. Overcoming abandonment is something that…read more