Forgiveness isn't telling someone it was okay to hurt you. It's telling yourself it’s okay to stop hurting. It doesn’t mean you have to trust them again. It means you can learn to trust yourself again. It doesn’t mean you have to give them a free pass back into your life. It means you are free to take your life back again. Forgiveness is simply emptying your past of its power to empty your present of its peace.

Life doesn't always get better.But you do. You get stronger.You get wiser. You get softer.With tattered wings you rise.And the world watches in wonderat the breathless beauty ofa human who survived life.

Pieces of who I wasshatteredreassembledinto who I am;Shards shaping into prisms casting arcs of soul-fireinto who I will be;I am a kaleidoscopeof all the versionsof myselfI was and amand will become.

The world told you that you had to hide your pain,to be small and quiet,so you wouldn't rock the boat.And you believed.Then one day you saw the silent pain in the eyesof a small and quiet girl in a boat boundfor nowhere.And a warrior awoke.You freed the girl from the silent shacklesand told her that her story mattered,to tell it deep and wide and loud,to set the boat ablaze with every fierce and fiery wordso all the world could hearand heal.And you believed.

Life is amazing. And then it's awful. And then it's amazing again. And in between the amazing and the awful, it's ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That's just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it's breathtakingly beautiful.

And just when the darkness became too much to bearand the struggle too hard,the light broke throughand the caterpillar emergeda butterflydelicate but unbroken,wild and gentle,finally free to spread its lovely wingsand fly away on the wind.