How We Begin
My husband and I just returned from a weekend trip to Nayarit, México, where we celebrated the wedding of two of our dearest friends. It was a beautiful three-day event in one of the most stunning places I have ever been.
I had the honor of leading a meditation at the ceremony and while I was preparing, I meditated on the significance of beginnings. The start of a sunrise, the first breath of a life, the opening act of a play, the first rain of a season. Every beginning is a powerful story of possibility, wonder, awe, and mystery. Every beginning is also an ending.
My 45th birthday is coming up and this one feels more emotional than any other in recent memory because it marks an end to the road of self-discovery and self-reclamation I’ve been on for more than two decades. The growth journey will continue, but the version of me that got me this far - the woman who fought to find herself - is gone. She is gone because her mission is complete.
I have been saying goodbye to her in pieces as I have been gradually decolonizing my body and mind, dissolving habits and internal belief systems rooted in scarcity and unworthiness. The process has been raw and honest, like undressing in front of a mirror and standing still with my bare reflection.
The woman looking back at me today is free and unfamiliar in ways that are difficult to describe. She is both new and old, fresh and weathered. She has the curiosity of my inner niña and the bullshit radar of my inner vieja. She is a quiet beginning emerging from a bittersweet ending.
It is an odd adjustment to move around in the world as her, but fortunately I feel supported knowing I am not alone. By choice and by circumstance, my life has been full of women who have shown me what is possible when we are brave enough to begin again.
My grandmother was in her early forties when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, underwent a mastectomy, became a single mom of five, restarted her education (from where she left off in 6th grade) to earn her GED, and learned how to drive a car for the first time. She said goodbye to parts of her body, her identity, a version of herself she had known for most of her adulthood, and she began again.
She lost her second battle with cancer almost thirty years later, but her presence in my childhood as a strong, independent woman who didn’t give up on herself when life got messy, a woman who chose to make beginnings out of endings, made a lifelong impression on me.
To her, and for us, I offer these words as a love letter and an invitation to keep beginning.
